PART 1 — THE POCKET
I woke up the morning after my wedding happier than I could remember being in years.
Everything felt settled.
Safe.
For once, my life had arrived somewhere instead of threatening to fall apart.
Then I put my hand inside my husband’s tuxedo pocket.
And within seconds, every fear I thought I had outgrown came rushing back.
Callum was still asleep in our honeymoon suite, buried beneath a white hotel duvet with one bare arm stretched across the pillow where I had been lying.
I stood beside the armchair wearing nothing but a hotel robe.
His black tuxedo lay across the chair exactly where he had thrown it at two in the morning.
Twenty-four hours earlier, he had stood beneath strings of warm garden lights and promised me that whatever happened in our marriage, we would never build a life around secrets.
Now I was holding his
jacket as though it might contain evidence that those promises had already been broken.
My name is Valerie.
I was twenty-seven years old.
And before Callum, I had become almost embarrassingly skilled at discovering things men believed they had hidden well.
Darren had kept a second phone in the glove compartment of his car.
Mitchell introduced me repeatedly to a woman he called his cousin.
She was actually his fiancée.
By twenty-three, I had developed what my best friend Felicia called:
“a graduate degree in suspicious behavior.”
Then Callum entered my life.
And refused to behave suspiciously.
On our third date, he put his unlocked phone on the restaurant table.
“I don’t do secrets.”
I laughed.
“Everybody has secrets.”
“Fine.
I don’t do the kind that requires remembering which lie I told on Tuesday.”
That was Callum.
For four years, there were no unexplained disappearances.
No mystery accounts.
No hidden
phones.
No suddenly changed passwords.
We shared calendars.
Budget alerts.
Streaming accounts.
Locations when traveling.
If a woman from his office sent him a message at midnight, he showed me before I had time to become curious.
Not because I demanded surveillance.
Because openness came naturally to us.
