Chapter 2 - HIS DATE WAS ON THE LIST
I kept expecting to find an explanation in the photographs. A strange angle. A rehearsal joke. Some reason the man with Colin's face and Colin's jacket had put his mouth against someone else's while I sat with our children on the other side of the building.
I looked until Iris called from her crib.
I closed the gallery, picked her up, and spent the rest of the afternoon doing what I'd planned to do before the email came: laundry, snacks, the daycare forms due on Friday. I couldn't stop wondering whether Colin had meant to return for dinner at all.
After bedtime, I reopened the link. The sequence was clear. At 6:32 he was in the conservatory. At 6:43, when he'd sent Please handle dinner, he was standing beside the woman. At 6:44, he kissed her. A photograph taken twenty minutes later showed him laughing with Miles's college friends, his ring still absent.
I saved the email and screenshots with their timestamps. Then I wrote to the photographer to tell her the full wedding preview appeared to have been sent to me in error. She replied the next morning, apologized, and corrected the link. My family session was in a separate folder, just as it should have been.
I didn't ask her to tell me what she'd overheard. Her pictures had already told me enough about where Colin spent dinner.
“Who is the woman in green?” I asked him that evening.
He was standing at the kitchen counter rinsing Iris's cup. His shoulders tightened before he turned around.
“What woman?”
I showed him one photograph on my phone. I had imagined he might apologize. Instead, he put the cup down with a sharp click.
“Why do you have pictures from somebody else's wedding?”
“The photographer sent the wrong gallery.”
“Then you should have closed it.”
“Who is she, Colin?”
He said her name was Delia. He said they'd made a mistake after too much wine, though the photograph was taken before the main course. When I pointed that out, he said the time on the camera might be wrong. I showed him his text from one minute earlier.
He stared at it, then asked whether I wanted to wake the children by fighting in the kitchen.
I lowered my voice. “Were you with her while I was trying to find you?”
“I told you it was a mistake.”
“You arranged for my dinner to be packed before I decided to leave.”
He said I always made the hardest possible interpretation of things. Then he went upstairs. By the time I followed, he'd taken a pillow into the guest room.
The next morning I called Celia. We weren't close, but I'd spent enough time with her over the years to know she wouldn't invent a story to protect Colin. I told her only that the photographer had sent me images of Colin with another guest. I asked if she knew the woman's name.
There was a long silence.
“Audrey,” she said, “are you at home?”
I told her the triplets were at daycare and I was in my car outside the school where I worked. I was an occupational therapist there four days a week. I had twenty minutes before my first student.
“Her name is Delia Voss,” Celia said. “She was Colin's date.”
For a moment I thought I'd misheard her. “His what?”
“Miles told me you two were separated. Colin told him.”
I asked when. Celia said Miles had received an email six weeks before the wedding, when he was confirming seats and meal choices. Colin wrote that he and I were living apart but bringing the children to a brief family photo session because Miles loved them. He asked to bring Delia to the evening reception.
I sat there listening to a school bus hiss to a stop beside my car.
In March, Colin and I had signed a new lease on the house where our children slept. In May, I'd rearranged my work schedule to make daycare pickup easier for both of us. In August, we'd argued about which of our parents could keep the triplets during a teacher training day. We had never lived apart for a single night unless one of us was traveling for work.
“I thought you knew,” Celia said. “I am so sorry.”
I asked whether Miles had seen me at the wedding. Of course he had. He'd hugged all three children before the photographs. But Colin had told him that we were trying to co-parent kindly. Miles had believed his oldest friend rather than asking me a question that would have felt intrusive.
Celia offered to forward the relevant email. I said yes, then had to walk into school and spend the morning helping a seven-year-old practice buttoning his coat. I was glad for the work. His concentration gave me something real to look at.
The email came during lunch. Colin's message was polite, full of appreciation for the invitation. Near the bottom was a sentence I read three times:
May you like
Audrey and I separated in March. The kids will come with her for photos, and Delia will join me for dinner.
Colin had told me he'd invited us because he wanted everyone to see our happy family. He'd told his best friend I was bringing our children so he could pose for a picture with them before his real date arrived.
