"Seven years, and you're still jealous."

I didn't say Rachel's name out loud.

Not yet.

I sat back down, folded my hands on the table, and watched Ethan set his phone face-down with the particular carefulness of someone who has just realized they've made a mistake they can't take back.

"Who's Rachel?" I said.

His hand stayed on top of the phone.

"A colleague."

"Which firm?"

A beat too long.

"Meridian.

The accounting side."

"You don't work with anyone at Meridian."

"We've been subcontracting." He picked up his wine glass.

A prop.

Something for his hands.

"Then you won't mind if I call her." I held out my hand for the phone.

He didn't give it to me.

That was its own answer.

Vanessa was watching him with an expression I hadn't expected to see on her face.

Something between recognition and nausea.

"Is she the one you told me about?" Vanessa said.

Her voice had gone very careful.

"The one you said was helping you restructure the business accounts?"

Ethan said nothing.

"Ethan." Vanessa's voice sharpened.

"Did you use my money to—"

"This is not the conversation we're having right now."

"It is absolutely the conversation we're having right now." She stepped toward him.

"I gave you sixty-two thousand dollars because I thought you were trying to save your marriage and your business.

If that money went somewhere else, I need to know."

"Your marriage?" David said.

He looked at his wife.

"You gave him money to save his marriage."

"I thought I was helping."

"You thought you were helping him," David said slowly, "and instead you—" He stopped.

He put one hand over his mouth and stared at the ceiling.

Noah slid down the wall of the doorway and sat on the floor.

He pulled his knees up.

I looked at him.

"Noah.

You don't have to be in here."

"I know," he said.

"But if I leave I'll just sit in the kitchen thinking about it."

That was fair enough.

I turned back to Ethan.

"Give me the phone."

"Claire—"

"Or unlock it and set it on the table."

He unlocked it.

He set it on the table.

But his thumb moved before he set it down, and when the screen faced up, the message thread with Rachel was already gone from the main screen.

He'd deleted the thread.

In front of all of us.

At the dinner table on his birthday.

David said, "He just deleted something."

"I saw," I said.

"You can recover deleted messages," Noah said from the floor.

"There are apps."

We all looked at him.

"What?" he said.

"I'm fourteen.

Not ignorant."

Ethan's composure finally broke — not dramatically, not with shouting.

It broke the way overworked things break: quietly, at the seam.

"I made mistakes," he said.

"I made serious mistakes and I handled them badly and I know that.

But Rachel is not—it's not what you're thinking.

She helped me move some funds when the Hargrove account went under and I needed things to not show up on our joint statements yet—"

"Yet," I repeated.

"Until I could fix it."

"How much?" Vanessa said.

Silence.

"Ethan.

How much of my money went to Rachel?"

He sat down.

He pressed his fingertips to the bridge of his nose.

"Some of it."

"How much is some."

"Vanessa—"

"How.

Much."

He said a number quietly, into his hand.

Vanessa went very still.

"Say that again," she said.

He said it again.

She picked up her wine glass, walked calmly to the kitchen, and set it in the sink.

When she came back, she stood in the doorway to the dining room — the same doorway Noah had been standing in — and looked at Ethan with an expression I can only describe as the last stage before action.

"I want that money back," she said.

"Every cent.

And I want it documented."

Ethan looked up.

"Vanessa, be reasonable.

I'll pay you back, but I need—"

"I have a lawyer," she said.

"I have been very reasonable for fourteen months.

I am finished being reasonable."

"You have a lawyer?" David said.

She looked at her husband.

Something passed between them — complicated and old and not entirely resolved.

"I started looking into things two months ago.

When the story about the business stopped making sense."

"You didn't tell me."

"No." A pause.

"I didn't."

The room had rearranged itself.

Four people, all of us lied to, sitting in the wreckage of a birthday dinner.

The roast beef had gone cold.

The chocolate cake sat untouched.

Ethan looked at me.

His voice came down to almost nothing.

"Claire.

Can we please—"

"No," I said.

I picked up my phone.

"I'm calling my sister.

She's a financial attorney.

She's going to tell me exactly what I can and cannot do tonight." I stood up.

"Nobody leaves."

Ethan's hand came out toward me.

"Claire, don't do this tonight—"

"You had fourteen months," I said.

"I'm taking one phone call."

I walked into the hallway.

My hands were steady.

My heart was not.

But I kept walking, because the alternative was standing still in that room while my husband watched me absorb another thing he'd done, and I was finished absorbing.

My sister answered on the second ring.

"Claire?

It's late.

Is everything—"