Page 44 of Circle of Strangers
I glance toward the window, the late-morning sun slanting through the blinds in neat stripes.
“I don’t know anymore.” The words slip out before I can stop them. “Nothing has felt right since we moved to Saguaro Circle.”
Will leans back against his desk, arms crossed over his expanding chest. He watches me closely, as if waiting for something more. “Are you saying you want to move?”
I think about the location—the privacy. The security. The gates upon gates. The cameras. The quiet, cloistered neighborhood that felt like a sanctuary when we first arrived.
Now it just feels like a prison.
Will’s desk phone rings, the receptionist announcing another student is waiting for him in the lobby.
He winces, apologetic. “I hate to leave you like this, but I have another appointment. Can we finish this talk tonight?”
I pause, giving him a sullen, sad-eyed look, and then I nod like the loyal, trusting, agreeable wife he wants to believe I still am. After everything that came to light in San Diego, I never changed who I was around him or how I treated him. I stayed the same. I had to. It was the only way to keep our marriage intact. Jacqueline had already tried to ruin it—I wasn’t going to give her the pleasure of knowing it crumbled anyway.
While Will is busy pulling up files on his computer, I swipe his phone off the credenza behind him and tuck it into my pocket. “See you tonight.”
31
I’m halfway home when I can’t take the suspense another minute. I pull off into a Whole Foods parking lot and retrieve Will’s phone out of my bag. Scrolling through his texts, I find the thread between him and “M.”
Sure enough, there was a message from “M” sent yesterday—Thinking of you always, my love. Wish we were together right now, but I know we will be soon. I truly hope your wife can someday understand and forgive me and we can all leave the past in the past.
I see red.
Then everything goes black.
32
“Camille.” Mara leans against the frame of her front door, arms crossed, her blond waves draped over one shoulder. She looks exhausted in all the ways and thinner than ever, like she left a piece of herself wherever she was the last several days. But her expression is composed, carefully neutral, like she’s trying to act like everything’s fine. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
I came straight here as soon as I got home from picking up groceries. Didn’t even bother unloading them. Until I know if “M” is Mara, nothing else matters.
“I heard you were back. I wanted to personally stop by and tell you I’m glad you’re home safe. You had us all worried.” I study her in better detail, scanning her expression for guilt, shock, a confirmation that she’s a giant piece of home-wrecking shit.
“Thank you,” she says, her voice low, laced in shame or secrecy perhaps.
“Is everything okay?” I ask. “With you and Oscar? Areyouokay?”
While I feign compassion, I’m merely gathering information.
She rolls her eyes. “I’m fine. I was ... I wasn’t acting rationally. After finding the dating app on his phone, I wanted to retaliate, I guess. I wanted him to know he could lose me. I thought disappearing would make him panic, make him regret it. It was impulsive and childish, I know. But at the time? It felt ... like my best option. Again,I wasn’t thinking straight. I’m honestly pretty embarrassed about the whole thing.”
Embarrassed? Or disappointed it didn’t work out the way she’d hoped? I imagine a scenario where Will was meant to run off with her but chose not to for whatever reason.
“Your face was all over the news.” I leave out the detail about it being discussed for half of a hot minute. “We thought you were dead, that something terrible happened to you. Where did you go?”
“I rented a car, drove up north, stayed in this little cabin in the middle of nowhere. No phone, no contact with anyone. Just me and my thoughts.”
“You rented a car?” I raise an eyebrow. From what I heard, she’d left her wallet at home. “How’d you pull that off without a credit card?”
Mara’s eyes flick away, just for a second, but it’s enough to make my stomach tighten.
“I had help,” she says vaguely.
I wait for her to elaborate, but she doesn’t.
I make a mental note to check our credit card activity the second I get home.
