Something about the way she repeated it made me look up sharply into the rearview mirror. She was staring out the window, not at me, her small face reflected faintly in the glass.
“Of course,” I said. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason.”
But there was definitely a reason.
The courthouse was downtown, a wide stone building with tall steps and brass doors that always made me think of history and punishment. The inside smelled like paper, old wood, copier toner, and winter coats damp from the outside air. Everything echoed. Shoes. Coughs. Murmurs. Even fear seemed louder there.
Margaret met us in the hallway outside the family courtroom, carrying two thick files and a paper cup of tea.
“You look beautiful, Lily,” she said warmly.
Lily offered a small smile.
Margaret bent slightly toward me and lowered her voice. “He brought extra counsel.”
“Of course he did.”
“Don’t let it rattle you.”
Then I saw him.
Mark stood across the hall near the courtroom doors in a dark suit I had bought him for a holiday party three years earlier. It still fit him perfectly. He was speaking with a tall attorney in an expensive gray tie and polished black shoes, the kind of man whose confidence arrived before he did. And beside them, her hand resting lightly on the strap of a cream handbag, was Kelly.
The floor shifted under me.
She wore beige heels, a fitted coat, and the expression of a woman trying hard to appear sympathetic while secretly thrilled to have been chosen for the scene. Her hair was perfectly smooth. Her lipstick too careful. When she saw me looking, something flickered across her face—not guilt, not exactly, but discomfort at being forced out of rumor and into consequence.
So that was it. No more vague suspicion. No more odor of denial. No more wondering whether I had imagined signs because grief makes women creative in the wrong directions.
The affair stood ten feet away in nude pumps.
Margaret touched my elbow. “Eyes forward.”
But my body had already absorbed the information. I felt sick and cold and strangely clear at once. Mark noticed me then, and instead of shame, he looked irritated. As if my seeing Kelly here was an inconvenience to his strategy, not the obscenity it was.
Lily had followed my gaze.
She stared at Kelly for a long moment, then at Mark, then lowered her eyes.
When the bailiff opened the doors, we went in.