That’s how I found out about his wife.
Eleven
Her name was Kimberly. She had her PhD from UC Berkeley, several papers listed in the indexes of things like Clinical Microbiology and The Journal of Parasitology. From what I could tell, she was presently on staff with a research project out of Grace Memorial Hospital in Chicago. And she had cowritten at least two papers with Aubrey. One was called “Patterns in Parasitic Modification of Host Behavior,” and the whole thing was posted on a newsgroup, ripped off from a magazine called Nature. The other one I found was “Cystic Extent as Behavioral Metric in T. gondii Infection.”
In the pictures of her that I found online, she had shoulder-length auburn hair and surprisingly blue eyes. When she smiled, she looked a little like Nicole Kidman. I found a website with pictures of a rafting trip that she and Aubrey both went on a few years before. There were four other couples, but I kept staring at Aubrey, who was laughing, his arms around his wife. In the photograph, his wedding ring seemed to glow.
She was beautiful. She was well educated. She was married to the man I’d just fucked. I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. I sat in the darkness, the robe catching on my stitches when I breathed. The right thing to do was wake him up and ask him. Talk to him. Let him explain.
Instead, I pulled up Thunderbird and went through his e-mail. A quick search of his inbox listed a dozen messages from her in the last weeks. I read the last four, hoping they were talking about divorce. They weren’t. The best thing I could say was they weren’t love letters. The tone between them was intimate and friendly, talking about old friends and shared sources. The last one was from only two days ago. It was a short note saying that she was sorry to hear about Eric’s death, and telling him to be careful. When I pulled up a copy of his previous year’s tax returns, it listed his status as married.
I left the laptop on the couch. I managed to get all of my clothes up off his floor without waking him. I dressed in the bathroom with shaking hands. I thought I might cry or throw up, but I just pulled on my underwear and my skirt. The scoop top was badly wrinkled, but I wasn’t going back in to steal one of Aubrey’s shirts. If I looked like I was on the walk of shame, that was pretty much dead accurate. I pulled the top on, put my feet in my low, comfortable heels, and grabbed my purse on the way out.
The university district came to life slowly as the black night sky paled to blue. I found a coffee shop, where I ordered a cappuccino with two extra shots and a lousy pastry that I looked at more than actually ate. The fatigue of a sleepless night had started to wear on me. My side ached, my ribs ached, my knee was swelling again where the haugtrold had wrenched it. I’d been dancing on it. How stupid was that? I’d been hurt, almost killed, and I’d numbed the wounds with martinis and techno-pop in an all-out effort to get myself seduced by Aubrey, the married guy. Nice going, Jayné.
I wanted the coffee to be as bad as the pastry. I wanted bitter, tasteless blackness and half-soured cream, but it was actually pretty good. The barista was maybe a year younger than me, with a pierced tongue and nose. She put on a Ray Charles CD, raised her eyebrows at me to ask if I needed anything, and left me alone when I shook my head. I cupped the cappuccino in my hands and let the music and the dawn change the moment for me.
Okay, I felt stupid. Okay, I’d been humiliated. It wasn’t the first time. It probably wouldn’t be the last. I’d let myself fall for a guy who had lied to me, or at least omitted a great big honking truth that pretty much anyone would have seen as worthy of mention. I wondered whether I would have done anything different if I’d known he was married. I was fairly certain I would have.
On the upside, I still had the money and property Eric had left me. Midian and Ex and Chogyi Jake were all probably at my house right now, working on the plan to avenge Eric and break the Invisible College. I’d helped save Candace and Aaron from a rider. I just had to stop the bullshit, decide what was actually important to me, and take care of business. Going to bed with Aubrey had been a mistake. Mistakes happen. It was time to move on.
I thought back to my post-shopping breakdown with Chogyi Jake. It was possible that I was a little more vulnerable and raw than I wanted to admit. Going for Aubrey—going for anyone—was a normal kind of screwup to make. Lonely little girl reaches out to the first kind face that wanders by. Pathetic? Okay, I could accept that. I just wouldn’t let it happen again.
I wondered if Ex and Chogyi Jake knew about Kimberly. Ex, maybe. It would explain why he’d seemed so pissed off at the two of us going out. I thought Chogyi Jake would have warned me. Maybe. Or maybe not. They were quick enough to hide the bodies of the people I’d helped kill, but maybe that didn’t really put them on my side.
Whatever my side was.
“Fuck you, Aubrey,” I said to myself. “I needed a stand-up guy, and I got you instead. How fair is that?”
People came in and out of the coffee shop, mostly students, I guessed. The barista worked her machine in bursts of steam and the gurgling of espresso. Ray Charles calling his friend to go get stoned segued to a cover of “Yesterday” that pointed out how clean and soulless Paul McCartney really sounded. It was nice sharing a little morning pain with Ray, if only because he put me in perspective. I finished my coffee, left the pastry half eaten, and headed out to the street. It took a while to find a taxi, but I managed, and twenty minutes later I was home.
“Sweet fucking Jesus,” Midian said as soon as I walked in. “I figured you for dead.”
“Not dead,” I said, and tossed my purse on the couch. “Where is everyone?”
“Out looking for you,” Midian said. “Aubrey came by a couple hours ago looking like someone stole his dick and said you’d gone missing.”
“Well, you can tell him I’m back,” I said. “I need to get into some clean clothes.”
“Not such a good date, eh?” Midian asked. It was hard to tell with his ruin of a voice, but I thought he was a little amused. I didn’t answer.
I’d changed into jeans and one of Eric’s white button-down shirts when I heard Aubrey and Ex arrive. Their voices were harsh, like they’d been fighting. I stretched, summoned up my righteous anger, and headed out to take the bull by the horns.
Ex was livid. He wheeled on me as soon as I appeared in the living room.
“What exactly was that little stunt supposed to—”
“Jayné,” Aubrey said at the same time, “we need to talk about—”
I put my palm out toward Ex, shutting him down, and turned to Aubrey.
“We need to talk?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Please, I understand what happened, and I know what it seems like, but—”
“Are you and Kimberly divorced?” I asked.
Aubrey blushed and looked down at his feet. Ex’s jaw actually dropped. I’d always thought that was just a figure of speech. Apparently he hadn’t known.
“Aubrey?” I said.
“We’re separated,” he said.
“Not divorced,” I said.
“No.”
“So then still married.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t tell me,” I said.
“No,” Aubrey said. “I should have.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ve talked.”
I brushed past Ex and into the kitchen. It was probably only my own embarrassment and humiliation that made me read Ex’s expression as delight. When he and Aubrey followed me in a moment later, they were both perfectly sober. Midian was sitting at the kitchen table, the telephone handset to his ear.
“Jake,” he said, pointing at it. “He put me on hold. It’s okay, though. You two were loud enough back there I followed everything.”