Lacey said, “Who lives at 4B?”
Nothing.
Then Nathan said, “This isn’t what you think.”
Lacey looked at the woman in his sweatshirt. “You sent her flowers.”
“She knew what this was.”
“Did she know I was your wife?”
“Stop making this bigger.”
I heard myself say, “Nathan, you used my card.”
He went quiet. Not sorry. Quiet.
Lacey ended the call. The woman handed her the note, but Lacey didn’t read it. She turned to me instead.
“Did you know?”
“No.”
“Did you suspect?”
I looked at the folded receipt. “I suspected enough to come here.”
She nodded like that answer cost her something.
We left the apartment without the tulips. Lacey carried the yellow roses back to the van, but she didn’t put them in the front. She laid them across the back seat, where the balloon brushed the ceiling each time we turned.
The next week was ugly and plain. Lacey changed the locks. Nathan moved into a rented room near his job. I gave Lacey the receipts and the card, then stopped answering Nathan’s calls for three days because I was mad at him and ashamed of myself. On the fourth day, I answered.
“Tell her I love her,” he said.
I said, “You tell her.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. You just don’t want to.”
That was the last real talk I had with him for a while.
Two weeks later, Amber called me from Petal Barn. She said the manager had checked the order records because Lacey had asked for a copy. The second arrangement had not been sent to some random woman at Briar Court. It had gone to Nathan’s coworker, the woman in the sweatshirt. The same card paid for both orders.
Then Amber said there was one more thing.
The handwriting on the second card was Lacey’s because Lacey had written it herself. She had copied the anniversary message onto a blank card, placed the order, and used my card because she knew Nathan would recognize his own debit card and stop the delivery. She wanted him to think his secret had reached my purse before it reached her hands.
She had already found the affair. The flowers were the trap.
I looked at the receipt again. Under the charge was the note Amber had added: “Customer confirmed wife handwriting.”
That little pencil mark wasn’t a number for the florist. It was Lacey marking the first card so she could match the second one.
I had spent the whole day trying to protect my son from a bill. Lacey had been collecting proof.
And the second card really did say, “Love, Nathan.”
