Her Husband's Second Phone

"I'm calling Jess," he says. "Why Jess?" "Because she's your best friend, and she's worried, and so am I." He's already walking into the hall. I hear him dial. And then I hear his voice drop into something I haven't heard it do in a while. "Hey. It's me." Dan doesn't say "it's me" to people. Dan says his full name to the pharmacist. "No. She found... Yeah. I know. I know. Just keep an eye on her tonight."

The night before, I'm at my own dinner table, and my husband is telling our friends about the sock.

"Tell them about the sock," my husband says.

Everyone's laughing before he's told it. That's how good Dan is.

"Dan. Don't."

"No, babe, it's cute." He puts his wine down. "Nora thinks someone's reading her texts. So last week she puts a sock over the kitchen camera. A sock. One of my socks."

Jess laughs so hard she has to hold the table. Marcus doesn't laugh. Marcus peels the label off his beer.

"It was pointed at me," I say. "It's a camera. Watching is literally its whole job."

"It's for the dog," Dan says. "We don't have a dog anymore. So technically she's mad at nothing."

Jess wipes her eyes. "Theo does that! That old tablet you gave him? He's got a sticker over the camera. Sixteen and paranoid. You two should start a club."

"We have a club," I say. "It's called book club. You run it."

More laughing. Good. I'm funny. I'm fine.

Then Dan does the sunglasses.

"Third pair this year," he says. "Last week I find them in my glovebox. And she swears, swears, she hasn't been in my car."

"I haven't been in your car since spring."

"See?" He opens his hands like a magician. "Since spring."

Jess touches my wrist. "Hon. Dan says it's been since September. The forgetting. You can tell us."

Dan says. Dan's been saying. To my best friend. For a month.

I'm a court reporter. I take down what people say at two hundred and twenty-five words a minute, and I don't get to pick which words matter. So I hear all of it. I hear Jess's laugh go a little too high. And I hear Marcus, very quietly, say, "Leave it, Daniel."

Nobody calls him Daniel. His mother, when he's in trouble.

On the porch Jess hugs me for about a week, while Dan's already inside loading the dishwasher and whistling like a man with nothing in his glovebox.

Marcus stops on the bottom step. It's starting to rain.

"For the record," he says, "you're the least paranoid person I know, Nora."

"Then why is everyone laughing?"

He looks past me. Not at me. At the garage door.

"Because it's easier," he says. And he walks to the car.

One forty in the morning. Dan's asleep on his back, mouth open. No ring on his hand. He lost it at the lake in June, and he's told it at three different barbecues since, as a whole bit, with a fish in it.

My sunglasses can't be in his car. I haven't sat in his car since April. I'd swear to it under oath. I type the oaths.

So either I'm losing it, or somebody put them there.

I get up.

The garage smells like cold tires and rain on the roof. His car's unlocked. It's been unlocked for nine years. "Who steals a sales rep's car, Nor?"

I open the glovebox.

My sunglasses. Tortoiseshell, scratch on the left lens. Mine. Like they've been waiting for me.

And under them, a phone.

Not Dan's phone. Dan's phone is upstairs on his nightstand, face down, which is where it's lived since about September, and I noticed that, and I didn't say a word, because I'm the paranoid one.

This one's cheap. Black. Gas-station cheap. No case. No passcode. It just opens, like it wants to be read.

One thread. One contact, saved as a single letter. "N."

I tap the N. The number under it is mine.

My number. The one I've had since college.

I scroll up. Every message is from me. Not one reply. Just me, me, me, all the way up.

"Hello, Daniel."

"How was the gym on Sunday, Daniel?"

"Still not wearing your ring?"

"I know where you go."

Weeks of them. Sent from my number, in a voice that isn't mine, using a name I don't use.

I open my own phone. Sent messages. Nothing. Not one.

My hands are shaking, so I put both phones down on the passenger seat, side by side, and look at them.

Then the cheap one lights up.

New message. From N. From me. Sent right now, one fifty-two, while my own phone sits face up on the seat and my hands are in my lap.

"He didn't lose the ring."

Somebody sent that. Right now. To this phone, which I've been holding for four minutes.

Behind me the kitchen light comes on and lays a yellow square across the wet concrete.

"Nor?" Dan's voice, from the doorway. Very calm. "What are you doing in my car?"