Page 31 of Happy Wife

“What if I accidentally open something from Monticello or the Last Supper?”

“Go nuts.” He smiled.

I kicked off my shoes by the door and headed toward the alcove. As I made my way through the living room, though, I picked up a splinter on my bare foot.

“Ow.” I let out a little yelp and lifted the pained foot to checkit.

“You okay?” Will called from somewhere in the house.

“Yeah, I think I just…” My foot looked clean, so I kept walking. “Never mind.”

But as my view of the alcove came into focus, I stopped in my tracks.

“Hey, Will!” I called back, staring at the wine cellar, stunned.

The wine cellar had been pilfered. Not stripped clean but picked off in batches of two or three, leaving Swiss cheese gaps on shelves that—before we left—I would have sworn were full. The magnums had been swiped, too. And there was a broken bottle of red on the floor. I checked my foot again to see a sliver of blood on my heel.

“Yeah,” he called back, and I could tell by the sound of his voice that he was getting closer.

“I cut my foot,” I began. “And something’s going on with the wine.”

“Jesus.” He was standing beside me now, confused at the cherry-picked burglary. “What the fuck?”

He took a few steps forward, and I grabbed his arm. “Do you have shoes on?”

Looking at his feet, I realized he did. But he looked down at my foot and the trickle of blood that was pooling at my heel.

In an instant, Will scooped me up in his arms and cradled me.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you a Band-Aid, and then I’ll clean this up.”

I turned my head sideways to read an Opus One label amid the pieces of broken glass and an evaporating puddle of red wine, and a chill slid down my spine.

—

Twenty minutes later, Will had bandaged my foot, and we had cleaned up the broken glass. But we were still staring, bewildered, at the wine cellar. Someone had made off with Will’s priciest wines, leaving the lesser labels behind.

“You don’t think Mia would do this?” I said, not believing for a second she could.

“Mia wouldn’t know which bottles were the most valuable.” He shook his head. “She can barely tell the difference between Merlot and Welch’s.”

“Of course. But who else could even get in? Don’t you have a security system?”

He exhaled a sigh and twisted his neck to one side. “Damnit.”

“What?”

But he was on his feet, headed for his home office. I followed a few steps behind him.

He pulled out an iPad from his desk drawer. “There’s a camera on the doorbell.”

“That’syour only camera? For the whole house?” This seemed almost as shocking as the theft. “This is a big place, Will.”

“Yeah.” He was barely listening.

He opened an app on the iPad and a video queued up. A live feed of the front door. He slid his pointer finger to rewind the timeline, scrolling past snippets of him and me walking in the front door a little while ago. The video feed would go blank if there was no activity, so he scrolled past some stretches of time easily. When there was activity, though, like the mail delivery or adrop-off from UPS, he slowed down the playback to watch a little more carefully.

Then, there she was. Saturday morning around ten. A pretty, petite brunette carrying boxes of wine out of Will’s front door.

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