Chapter 3Where Love Lies Buried

Liam looked like a robot that had just been powered down, his hand falling limply to his side.

Outside, a roll of thunder broke the silence, and the sky opened up.

His phone rang, a shrill intrusion. I glanced at the screen. The contact name read, “Zoe from Accounting.” I couldn’t help but laugh. A plausible, professional-sounding alias. But I already knew.

After all, what kind of colleague texts you at midnight saying, I miss you so much. There’s a thunderstorm and I’m scared. Can you come be with me?

Liam declined the call. A second later, it rang again.

I watched him struggle. “Go on, answer it. She’s afraid of thunder.”

A tremor went through him. He grabbed my hand, his face a mask of panic. “Kaley, let me explain. She and I are just…”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, cutting him off. “We’re getting divorced. You can tell her the good news. You won’t have to sneak around anymore. You won’t have to rack your brain for those ridiculous, logic-defying excuses.”

I still didn’t understand it. How could he claim to love me and then run to her bed without a second thought? And he was so good at protecting her. After that one time she came to my door, I never saw her again, no matter how hard I tried.

Once, I’d followed his phone's GPS, running through the neighborhood in my pajamas and slippers. I was going to catch him in the act, leave him with no excuses left. I beat on the door of the apartment, but there was no answer, just a heavy, mocking silence from the other side. They were in there, together. That perfume, its phantom scent, was a constant reminder that she had never really left.

It was only later I realized he had installed a GPS tracker on my phone, too. He was always one step ahead.

From his studies in London to his return home, through our entire marriage, Zoe had been a ghost haunting our lives.

Time and time again, I would look at the face of the seventeen-year-old boy in the photo and forgive the twenty-seven-year-old man in my bed.

Finally, at twenty-eight, I threw the photo in the trash.