Evidence Between His Teeth

The spinach had been stuck between his incisor for three hours.

Maya watched it while he laughed at something his colleague said—this thin, green fragment of lunch that nobody else seemed to notice. But she noticed everything now. She'd become a different version of herself since finding the burner phone in his coat pocket last Tuesday.

"You're quiet," Daniel said, reaching for her hand across the restaurant table. His thumb stroked her palm—something that used to make her feel safe.

"Just tired." She smiled, but it felt like stretching a muscle that had forgotten how to relax.

Her iPhone buzzed in her bag. Again.

He'd been working late for three weeks. The new project, he'd said. The one that required him to silence his primary phone and carry that second one. The one she'd tracked to a residential building in Oakville last Wednesday, sitting in her car like some cheap detective in a noir film, watching him enter through a side door at 8:47 PM.

She should confront him. Should demand answers. Instead, she'd begun documenting everything—the way he showered immediately upon returning home, the sudden password on his laptop, the cologne he started wearing that she'd never purchased for him.

She'd become a spy in her own marriage.

"I was thinking," Daniel said, "we should go swimming tomorrow. Like we used to."

The mention of their Sunday morning ritual—the lake near his parents' house, where they'd met as friends six years ago, where he'd first kissed her with wet hair and sun-warmed skin—felt like a test.

"Sure," she said. "That sounds nice."

They'd been best friends before they were lovers. Before the mortgage, before the miscarriage that had hollowed them both out, before whatever this was that had grown between them like a tumor neither would acknowledge.

His phone lit up on the table. Not the iPhone she'd bought him for Christmas. The other one.

He didn't check it. He just smiled at her, that damned spinach still clinging to his tooth like evidence she wasn't supposed to see.

"You're the best thing that ever happened to me, you know that?"

She knew he believed it when he said it. She also knew belief wasn't the same as truth.

"I know," she said.

Tomorrow she'd check his phone while he slept. Tomorrow she'd know for certain. Tonight, she ordered another glass of wine and let herself believe, for one hour more, that the green fleck between his teeth was just spinach.