Chapter 4: Everything She Kept in That Phone
Richard was there in twelve minutes.
He didn't ring the bell.
He used his key, which I hadn't expected — something about that small detail made my throat tighten.
He still used his key.
As if some part of him was still fighting to make this not be what it was.
He came into the kitchen and stopped when he saw me.
"She's upstairs?" he asked.
"Yes."
He looked at the phone on the counter.
He didn't touch it yet.
He stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at it the way you look at something you already know is going to hurt you.
"You didn't open it?" he said.
"No."
"Okay." He picked it up.
The screen was locked, but the notification was still visible in the preview bar.
He read it without expression.
Then he set it face-down again, exactly where it had been.
"She'll have a passcode," I said.
"I know her passcode." He said it quietly, without bitterness.
That was almost worse.
"She uses Ethan's birthday."
He picked the phone back up and typed it in.
The screen unlocked.
He didn't hand it to me.
He turned slightly, and I watched his face as he read.
His jaw tightened.
He scrolled.
He stopped.
He scrolled again.
His breathing stayed measured and controlled, but a muscle in his cheek kept pulling.
"How long have you known?" he asked, without looking up.
"I didn't.
Not until this morning."
"You never suspected anything?"
"No." I said it plainly because it was true.
"Did you?"
He set the phone on the counter and turned to face me.
"I thought she was unhappy.
I thought the distance between us was something we'd eventually fix." He looked at the wall behind me.
"I had no idea there was someone else."
Footsteps on the stairs.
Both of us went still.
Nicole appeared in the kitchen doorway wearing different clothes — dark jeans, a cream blouse, a small overnight bag hanging from one shoulder.
She stopped when she saw Richard.
"You came back," she said.
Her voice was carefully neutral.
"I came back for my daughter," Richard said.
"Not for you."
Nicole's eyes moved to the phone on the counter.
Something shifted in her face — a quick, involuntary tightening — before she smoothed it back to calm.
"You went through my phone."
"You left it on the counter," I said.
"That's not an invitation."
"Neither was framing me for your pregnancy," I said.
"But here we are."
Nicole turned to Richard.
"I need you to let me explain."
"You explained this morning," Richard said.
"Fourteen months.
That was the explanation."
"There's more to it than that."
"I'm sure there is." He crossed his arms.
"So explain it.
Right now.
All of it."
She set the overnight bag down on the floor beside her.
"Daniel and I — it started when you took the Hargrove contract.
You were gone three weeks out of every four.
I was here alone with two children and you barely called."
"So you found someone who would call."
"I found someone who was present."
"For fourteen months."
"Yes." She met his eyes.
"For fourteen months."
"And the baby," Richard said.
The word landed flat and hard.
"Whose is it?"
A beat.
"Daniel's," she said.
Richard nodded slowly, the way people nod when they already knew the answer and just needed to hear it spoken.
He looked down at the counter.
His hand rested near the phone.
"Were you going to tell me?" he asked.
"I was trying to work out how."
"By putting the test next to Maya's bag?"
Nicole's jaw tightened.
"That was a mistake.
I panicked."
"You told me," Richard said, his voice rising slightly for the first time, "to tell our daughter that she was pregnant.
You let me look at her.
You let me think—" He stopped.
"She's nineteen years old, Nicole.
She's in her first year at university.
You looked me in the eye and you pointed at her."
Nicole said nothing.
"Was that a mistake?" he asked.
"Or was that a plan?"
The silence was long enough to be its own answer.
Richard picked up the phone again.
He turned it toward her.
On the screen was a message thread.
He held it steady so I could see it too.
The most recent message from Nicole to Daniel, sent at 6:47 that morning — eleven minutes before she had called me down to the kitchen — read: *It'll buy me time.
He'll throw her out before he asks any questions.
I just need two more weeks.*
The room went very still.
I read it twice.
It had not been a panic.
It had not been a mistake.
She had written the plan out in a message to her lover forty minutes before she picked up that pregnancy test and placed it next to my makeup bag.
"Two more weeks for what?" Richard said.
His voice was quiet again.
Quieter than before.
Nicole picked up her overnight bag from the floor.
"I think I should go."
"You're not going anywhere," Richard said, "until you answer my question.
Two more weeks for what, Nicole?"
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she looked at me.
May you like
And something in her expression changed — not into guilt, not into remorse, but into something colder and more deliberate.
"To move the accounts," she said.
