“Mr. Carter?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“We need to ask you some questions about Vanessa Cole.”

Emily stepped aside and allowed them in. The detective’s eyes moved across the room, noting the half-folded laundry, my jacket draped over the chair, the lipstick-stained shirt still resting on the bed in plain view. He noticed everything. Good detectives always do.

“I was with her tonight,” I admitted before he even started. “We had dinner. We argued. I left around nine-thirty.”

Ross wrote that down. “And where did you go after that?”

I began describing my route home, the gas station where I stopped for aspirin, the twenty minutes I sat in my car outside the neighborhood trying to gather the courage to walk inside. Then Ross asked the question that changed everything.

“Did your wife know Ms. Cole?”

“No,” I said.

But Emily said, “Yes.”

I turned so quickly I nearly knocked over the chair.

Ross looked at her. “Mrs. Carter?”

Emily crossed her arms. “Vanessa called me this afternoon. From a blocked number. She told me about the affair. She said she was giving Daniel one last chance to tell me himself.”

The ground seemed to tilt beneath me. “Why didn’t you say that?”

“Because you were busy deciding whether I meant divorce or murder,” she said flatly. “And because I wanted to hear what version of the truth you’d invent first.”

Ross’s pen stopped moving. “Did you meet with Ms. Cole tonight, ma’am?”

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