Page 42 of She Didn't See It Coming
He watches Paige’s eyes slide away from his.
“This is going to be hard, but I think you should know,” Paige says. “The police know and they’re going to tell you at some point.”
“Know what, for Christ’s sake?”
She looks at him now and says reluctantly, “Bryden was having an affair.”
“What?” He feels his body turn cold.
“I’m sorry,” Paige says earnestly.
He turns away and watches Clara using a yellow bucket to make a sandcastle. He doesn’t know what to say. What should he say? Finally, he manages, “How do you know?”
“She told me.”
“When?”
“About three weeks ago.”
“And you’re just telling me this now?”
“She was my best friend, Sam!” She adds, “I knew you’d be upset.”
“Of course I’m upset! For fuck’s sake, Paige!” He reminds himself to lower his voice. He asks, after a long beat, “Who was it?”
“It was that guy she hit in the Tesla.”
He turns to face her now. “Seriously?” He feels himself clenching his jaw. “How do the police know? Did you tell them?”
She nods miserably, her eyes watching Clara. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do. They kept pushing me and pushing me, and I didn’t want to tell them about us.” She adds, “I—I thought it would deflect them.”
He’s very upset now and doesn’t bother to hide it. He hisses, “But now they’ll think I had a motive to kill her. They’ll think Iknewshe was having an affair. Did you think of that?”
“I told them you didn’t know about it.”
“They won’t believe that, Paige!”
She moves closer to him and waits for him to focus on her, his gaze furious. “If I’d told them about us, they’d think you had a motive too,” she says defensively.
In the silence that follows, Sam turns to watch his daughter play by herself in the sand. His mind is racing. Now they will have another suspect, Bryden’s lover. He lets out a long exhale. But they will be looking more closely at him, too, and Paige could hurt him. He realizes he will have to be careful with her.
Sleeping with his wife’s best friend has been a mistake. A terrible mistake.
27
Sam is not even sure how it happened. Paige is an attractive woman; he’s always been aware of it. But so was his wife, and he’d remained faithful to her. Through pregnancy and childbirth, through the aftermath, through the exhaustion of raising a small child, through the programmed sex scheduled through the fertile parts of her cycle as they tried for months to conceive another child. But it hadn’t happened. The doctors said there was nothing wrong, it would happen, it would just take time. But the fun had gone out of trying, for both of them. Perhaps that was what had made him receptive to Paige.
Bryden had routinely gone out of town overnight once a month or so on business. Paige had started coming over in the evenings when Bryden was away, to keep him company and spend time with Clara. The first time, he’d told Bryden, and she thought that it was nice, that they’d had fun while she was away. The second time Paige invited herself over when Bryden was away, he hadn’t told his wife. He wasn’t sure why. There had been something between him and Paige that night, some new, delicioustension. They’d watched a movie together after they put Clara to bed. Paige didn’t have a partner in her life at the time. She’d complained lightly about the quality of the men out there, said all the good ones were taken. He knew she was lonely. He kept his distance.
The third time, he was on the cusp of telling her that maybe she shouldn’t come over every time Bryden was away. That he really could manage his toddler on his own. But he didn’t. And that night, after Clara was asleep in bed, and they sat down to watch TV with a glass of wine—that had been a mistake, the glass of wine—somehow, she’d kissed him. And he hadn’t been able to resist the easy pleasure of it. By the time they were half undressed, he’d pulled her into the bedroom, and she’d spent most of the night.
“We’ve crossed a line,” she said, clinging naked to him afterward, running her finger down his chest.
He was feeling sated, pleasantly relaxed. “Bryden must never know,” he whispered to her, looking directly into her eyes.
“No, never,” she agreed. “We must never hurt her.”
And so it had become an ongoing thing these last few months, that every time Bryden went away on business, he’d had sex in the marital bed with his wife’s best friend. Paige always left early in the morning, before Clara woke up. At some point, he knew, Paige would start dating someone else, and it would be over.
