Chapter 72: Proof

Ana did not bother with a warning text this time.

She went straight to the house in the late afternoon with the file already queued on her phone. Edward opened the door looking like a man who had not slept well. He let her in without asking why she was early. Ana walked past him into the living room, sat on the edge of the couch, and held the screen out.

“Watch it.”

Edward took the phone.

The video was worse than the rumor. It was the lecture hall. Elena on her own desk. Max behind her. David in her mouth. Hands everywhere. The girls who had joined. The ones who had only watched. The sound was clear enough that Edward lowered the volume after the first few seconds and kept watching anyway. His face did not go red. It did not twist into the anger Ana had come to collect. He just sat there with the phone in both hands and looked, for a long time, like someone being told a truth he had already half accepted in a kitchen the night before.

When the clip ended he set the phone on the table face down.

Ana waited.

“That’s it?” she asked. “You’re not angry?”

Edward let out a short breath that was almost a laugh and was not a laugh at all.

“What right do I have to be angry at her?”

Ana blinked.

“I’ve been fucking you in this house while she was at work,” he said. “In the guest room. On the couch. Against the door. I came home early and went to a bar and took you to a motel before I ever knew what she was doing. I don’t get to stand here and play the betrayed husband. I don’t have that part anymore.”

The words sat in the room between them, ugly and accurate. Ana had wanted rage. Rage would have been simple. Rage would have ended the marriage in a single raised voice. What she got instead was something quieter and harder to use.

Edward leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

“We’re both miserable in this,” he said. “That’s the part that’s true. If she’s been living a second life and I’ve been living one with you, then dragging this out is just cruelty. It’s better to end it. For both of us.”

Ana’s pulse jumped. That was the door she had been pushing toward for weeks. Official. No more guest-room door. No more listening for a car in the driveway.

“I have an idea,” she said.

Edward looked up.

Ana told him. Not a long speech. A simple shape. Elena would come home to the truth instead of another conversation she could joke her way out of. No more rumors. No more denials about twelve men being impossible. They would stop hiding. They would let her walk into what the marriage actually was. And then they would put her own recording on the screen so she could not pretend the only person in the house with a secret was sitting on the couch.

Edward listened.

After a moment he nodded.

“All right.”

They agreed.

Ana did not go into the guest room.

When Elena’s key turned in the lock an hour later, Edward and Ana were still in the living room.

They did not stop when the door opened.

Edward had Ana against the back of the couch, one hand under her top, the other at the front of his pants. Ana’s mouth was on his. Her fingers were wrapped around him. The sound of the door made both of them pause for half a second and then continue, because continuing was the point.

Elena stepped inside and stopped as if the floor had dropped.

“What the hell is this?”

Her voice came out too loud for the size of the room. The bag slid off her shoulder and hit the floor.

Edward turned his head just enough to look at her over Ana’s shoulder. He did not let go of her.

“Can’t you see?” he said. “We’re loving each other.”

Elena’s mouth opened and closed. The scene in front of her — her husband, her student, hands and mouths and the open fact of it in the middle of the living room — refused to arrange itself into something she could manage. She had spent weeks hiding her own life in locker rooms and offices and a concrete corridor under an arena. She had not prepared for the same thing waiting for her at home in the light.

“What is the meaning of this?” she demanded.

Edward reached for the remote on the coffee table without taking his other hand off Ana.

He pressed the button.

The television came on.

The lecture hall filled the screen.

Elena on the desk. Max behind her. David in her mouth. The class closing in. The girls who had joined. The wet sound that the speakers made slightly tinny and no less unmistakable. Elena’s own moan, recorded from the side aisle by a phone she had never seen.

Edward did not look at the screen. He looked at his wife.

“What’s the meaning of this?” he asked.

The video kept playing.

Ana watched Elena’s face instead of the television. This was the moment she had wanted — not Edward’s anger, but Elena’s. The moment the two lives in the house finally occupied the same room and neither of them could call the other a rumor.

Elena stood in the doorway with her bag on the floor and her own classroom on the screen, and for the first time since the tournament she had nothing ready to say.

End of Chapter 72

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