The wife I forgot to love novel Chapter 5

Cassidy called at seven the next morning.

Helena was already awake. She’d been awake since four, lying on her side of the bed listening to Damian breathe and thinking about the word *reconnecting* and what it was doing in her marriage.

She picked up before the second ring. “Talk.”

“Good morning to you too.” Cassidy’s voice was alert in the way of someone who had also not slept particularly well. “I found things.”

Helena sat up slowly. Damian shifted beside her. She slid out of bed and walked to the bathroom, closing the door quietly behind her.

“How much things,” she said.

“Enough.” A pause. “You sure you want to do this right now? Before coffee?”

“Cassidy.”

“Okay. Okay.” The sound of paper. Or maybe a keyboard. “Camila Calloway. Thirty one years old. Finance director at Vantage Group downtown. Moved back to Velmont eight weeks ago from New York where she worked at a firm called Aldridge Capital for four years.” Another pause. “Before New York she was here. In Velmont. For three years after university.”

Helena looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. “And before that.”

“Before that she was at Velmont University.” Cassidy’s voice changed slightly. Careful now. “Same years as Damian.”

The bathroom was very quiet.

“They were at university together,” Helena said.

“Same faculty. Business and finance. There are photos of them together from back then. A group thing, looks like a faculty event, but they’re standing next to each other and…” Cassidy stopped.

“And what.”

“And the way he’s looking at her in that photo is not how people look at someone they barely know.”

Helena sat down on the edge of the bathtub.

“How long,” she said. Not a question. Just words that needed to go somewhere.

“I don’t know exactly. But Hels… she didn’t just move back to Velmont. She moved back to a building four blocks from your house.”

Helena looked at the bathroom tiles. At the grout lines she’d cleaned herself two weekends ago on a Saturday morning while Damian was out. She’d spent three hours on those grout lines. She’d thought about nothing except making the bathroom clean.

“Four blocks,” she said.

“Four blocks.”

Helena stood up. Looked at herself in the mirror again. At the woman looking back who had been making rosemary chicken and cleaning grout lines and looking up every time a key hit the door while her husband was four blocks away from being someone else entirely.

“There’s more,” Cassidy said.

“Tell me.”

“I talked to Diane Mercer. You remember her, she works at Vantage, we went to school with her sister.”

“I remember Diane.”

“She says Camila has been talking about Damian. Not obviously. Not loudly. But the way women talk when they want people to know something without saying it directly.” Cassidy’s voice had gone flat and certain in the way it did when she was furious and containing it. “She told Diane he was an old friend she’d reconnected with. Said it with a specific kind of smile.”

Helena pressed her lips together.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay?” Cassidy’s voice went up slightly. “That’s all you’re going to say?”

“What do you want me to say, Cassidy.”

“I want you to say you’re going to walk out of that bathroom and tell your husband exactly what you know and give him the chance to…”

“No.” Helena said it quietly and completely. “Not yet.”

“Helena….”

“I said not yet.” She took a breath. “I need to know everything before I say anything. I need to know what I’m actually dealing with before I give him the chance to manage it.” She paused. “You know how he is. You know if I go out there half informed he will find a way to make it sound like something it isn’t and I will want to believe him because I always want to believe him.”

Silence on Cassidy’s end.

“I know,” Cassidy said finally. Quietly. “You’re right. I know.”

“Keep digging.” Helena straightened up. Looked at herself one more time. “I’ll call you tonight.”

She ended the call.

Stood in the bathroom for thirty more seconds.

Then she opened the door and walked back into the bedroom.

Damian was awake. Sitting up against the headboard looking at his phone. He put it down when she came in. Looked at her with that careful expression she was learning to read differently now.

“Morning,” he said.

“Morning.” She went to her dresser. Started getting dressed. “I have an early meeting. Don’t wait on breakfast.”

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