The wife I forgot to love

Cassidy called at seven the next morning.

Helena was already awake. She'd been awake since four, lying on her side of the bed listening to Damian breathe and thinking about the word *reconnecting* and what it was doing in her marriage.

She picked up before the second ring. "Talk."

"Good morning to you too." Cassidy's voice was alert in the way of someone who had also not slept particularly well. "I found things."

Helena sat up slowly. Damian shifted beside her. She slid out of bed and walked to the bathroom, closing the door quietly behind her.

"How much things," she said.

"Enough." A pause. "You sure you want to do this right now? Before coffee?"

"Cassidy."

"Okay. Okay." The sound of paper. Or maybe a keyboard. "Camila Calloway. Thirty one years old. Finance director at Vantage Group downtown. Moved back to Velmont eight weeks ago from New York where she worked at a firm called Aldridge Capital for four years." Another pause. "Before New York she was here. In Velmont. For three years after university."

Helena looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. "And before that."

"Before that she was at Velmont University." Cassidy's voice changed slightly. Careful now. "Same years as Damian."

The bathroom was very quiet.

"They were at university together," Helena said.

"Same faculty. Business and finance. There are photos of them together from back then. A group thing, looks like a faculty event, but they're standing next to each other and..." Cassidy stopped.

"And what."

"And the way he's looking at her in that photo is not how people look at someone they barely know."

Helena sat down on the edge of the bathtub.

"How long," she said. Not a question. Just words that needed to go somewhere.

"I don't know exactly. But Hels... she didn't just move back to Velmont. She moved back to a building four blocks from your house."

Helena looked at the bathroom tiles. At the grout lines she'd cleaned herself two weekends ago on a Saturday morning while Damian was out. She'd spent three hours on those grout lines. She'd thought about nothing except making the bathroom clean.

"Four blocks," she said.

"Four blocks."

Helena stood up. Looked at herself in the mirror again. At the woman looking back who had been making rosemary chicken and cleaning grout lines and looking up every time a key hit the door while her husband was four blocks away from being someone else entirely.

"There's more," Cassidy said.

"Tell me."

"I talked to Diane Mercer. You remember her, she works at Vantage, we went to school with her sister."

"I remember Diane."

"She says Camila has been talking about Damian. Not obviously. Not loudly. But the way women talk when they want people to know something without saying it directly." Cassidy's voice had gone flat and certain in the way it did when she was furious and containing it. "She told Diane he was an old friend she'd reconnected with. Said it with a specific kind of smile."

Helena pressed her lips together.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?" Cassidy's voice went up slightly. "That's all you're going to say?"

"What do you want me to say, Cassidy."

"I want you to say you're going to walk out of that bathroom and tell your husband exactly what you know and give him the chance to..."

"No." Helena said it quietly and completely. "Not yet."

"Helena...."

"I said not yet." She took a breath. "I need to know everything before I say anything. I need to know what I'm actually dealing with before I give him the chance to manage it." She paused. "You know how he is. You know if I go out there half informed he will find a way to make it sound like something it isn't and I will want to believe him because I always want to believe him."

Silence on Cassidy's end.

"I know," Cassidy said finally. Quietly. "You're right. I know."

"Keep digging." Helena straightened up. Looked at herself one more time. "I'll call you tonight."

She ended the call.

Stood in the bathroom for thirty more seconds.

Then she opened the door and walked back into the bedroom.

Damian was awake. Sitting up against the headboard looking at his phone. He put it down when she came in. Looked at her with that careful expression she was learning to read differently now.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning." She went to her dresser. Started getting dressed. "I have an early meeting. Don't wait on breakfast."

"Helena." His voice was careful. "About last night."

"Which part." She kept her back to him. Kept her hands moving. Picked up her watch and put it on.

"I want to explain."

"You said she's someone you knew before." She turned around. Looked at him directly. "I understood that."

"It's more complicated than..."

"Damian." She picked up her bag. "I have a meeting." She said it pleasantly. Clearly. Like a woman with somewhere to be and nothing in particular on her mind. "We can talk tonight."

He looked at her.

She looked back.

"Okay," he said finally.

She left.

She sat in her car outside their house for two minutes before she drove away. She looked at the front door in the rearview mirror. At the house she kept. At the life inside it that was happening without her full knowledge.

Then she drove.

The meeting was real. A quarterly review at work that lasted two hours and required her complete attention and got it because Helena Graves had never once let her personal life walk into a professional room. She sat at the conference table and contributed and listened and made notes and was present for every minute of it.

It was only when she got back to her desk and sat down and the noise of the meeting fell away that her hands found each other under the desk and held on.

Her phone showed three missed calls from a number she didn't recognize.

She stared at it.

Called it back without thinking.

It rang twice.

"Helena." A woman's voice. Warm and easy and completely familiar even though Helena had only heard it once. Yesterday. At a restaurant. Extending a hand. *You must be Helena.*

Helena went very still.

"Camila," she said.

"I hope this isn't a bad time." Her voice was smooth. Unhurried. The voice of a woman who was not uncomfortable with this phone call at all. "I got your number from Damian's phone. I hope that's okay."

It was not okay. Helena said nothing.

"I wanted to reach out directly," Camila continued. "Woman to woman. I think there are some things you deserve to hear from me rather than through the grapevine."

Helena's hand tightened on the phone.

"I'm listening," she said.

A brief pause. Then Camila's voice came through differently. Softer. More considered.

"Damian and I have a history," she said. "A real one. Before you. I left Velmont because of how things ended between us and I spent four years in New York trying to close a door I never actually closed." Another pause. "When I came back I told myself it was just for the job. But I think you're smart enough to know that's not entirely true."

Helena looked at the wall of her office. At a framed print she'd chosen herself two years ago because the colors made her feel calm.

It was not making her feel calm right now.

"Why are you telling me this," she said.

"Because I think you already know." Camila's voice was still warm. Still steady. "And I think you're the kind of woman who would rather have the truth than a comfortable story."

The line was quiet for a moment.

"And I think," Camila added, gentler now, almost kind, which was somehow the worst version of this conversation, "that you deserve to make a decision based on what's actually happening. Not what you're hoping is happening."

Helena breathed in slowly through her nose.

"Thank you for calling," she said. Her voice was perfectly even. Perfectly professional. The voice she used in conference rooms and client meetings and every situation that required her to be composed while something large was happening. "I'll be in touch."

She ended the call.

She put the phone on the desk.

She looked at it for a long moment.

Then she picked it up and called Cassidy.

Cassidy answered on the first ring.

Helena said three words.

"She called me."

The silence on Cassidy's end lasted exactly one second.

Then Cassidy said something that Helena had never once heard her sister say in thirty years of knowing her.

And somehow that was what finally made Helena's eyes sting.