I glance up from our bedroom floor at Daniel leaning against the doorframe, smiling at me. He’s fresh out of the shower, a crisp white towel knotted around his waist and his arms crossed against his bare torso. He walks across the bedroom and starts flipping through a line of pressed white button-ups hanging in the closet. I stare at him for a second, at his perfectly tanned body. His toned arms, his dewy skin. I squint, noticing a scratch across his side, trailing from his stomach to his back. It looks fresh, and I try not to wonder how it got there. Where it came from. Instead, I look back down at my suitcase, at the pile of clothes heaped inside. It’s mostly jeans and T-shirts, practical things, and I realize I should probably toss in a dress and some stilettos for appearance’s sake—after all, that’s the kind of thing you wear on a bachelorette party.
“Who’s going to be there, again?”
“It’s small,” I say, nestling some heels into the corner of the bag. Heels I know I won’t be wearing. “Shannon, Melissa, some old work friends. I don’t want to make it a big thing.”
“Well, I think it’s great,” he says, picking a shirt from the hanger and hoisting it over his back. He walks toward me, the buttons still gaping open. Normally, I would have stood up, wound my arms around his bare skin, pressed my fingers into the muscles in his back. Normally, I would have kissed him, maybe led him back to bed before we both left for the day, no longer smelling like body wash but instead like each other.
But not today. I can’t today. So instead, I smile at him from the floor, then look back down at the clothes in my lap, focusing intently on the shirt I was folding.
“It was your idea,” I say, trying to avoid his eyes. I can feel them burrowing into my temple, trying to wade through the coils. “At the engagement party, remember?”
“I remember. I’m glad you listened.”
“And when you went to New Orleans, I thought that could be fun,” I say, glancing up at him. “An easy drive, not too expensive.”
I see his lips twitch, an invisible flicker I never would have noticed had I not already known the truth—that he was never in New Orleans. That the conference he had told me about in such detail—networking on Saturday followed by golfing on Sunday and sessions for the rest of the week—had never actually taken place. Actually, that’s a lie. It had taken place. Pharmaceutical sales reps had flocked to the city from all across the country, but not Daniel. He wasn’t there. I know because I had found the conference website, called the hotel, and asked them to send over a copy of his invoice, claiming to be his assistant filing an expense report. And he wasn’t there. No Daniel Briggs had checked in or out of the hotel, let alone registered for the conference. I had no way to confirm his recent trip to Lafayette, but I had a hunch that was a lie, too. That all of these trips he took, all of these long weekends and overnight drives that brought him home deliriously tired yet somehow more alive than ever were just a cover-up for something else. Something dark. And there was only one way to find out for sure.
There are so many things I don’t know about my fiancé, but living together has made one thing clear: He is a creature of habit. Every day, when he gets home, he tucks his briefcase neatly into the corner of the dining room, locked and ready for his next trip. And every morning, he goes for a run—four, five, six miles around the neighborhood, followed by a long, hot shower. And so, every day this week, after he kissed my forehead and stepped out of our house, I had crept into the dining room, my fingers pushing the digits back and forth on the combination lock, trying to crack the code. It had been easier than I had expected—he’s predictable, in a way. I had tried to think about all the numbers in Daniel’s life that could hold some type of meaning—his birthday, my birthday. The address of our home. After all, if Aaron had taught me anything, it’s that copycats are sentimental; their lives revolve around hidden messages, secret codes. After days of no luck, I sat down on the dining room floor, thinking, my eyes darting back and forth between his briefcase and our dining room window, just waiting for him to appear.
But then I stood back up, a thought creeping into my mind.
I glanced out the window again before trying one more combination: 72619. I remember lining the numbers up against the little tick marks etched into the lock’s side; I remember pushing the slider, hearing that click as the latch unlocked. The creak of the hinges as the satchel fell open, its contents organized neatly inside.