Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

She looked at her cell, willing it to vibrate, for “Brian” to show up in the caller ID. Somehow he’d clear this whole thing up. She’d finish the phone call laughing at her own paranoia.

Wait. Cell phone records. Of course. She didn’t have his — his cell phone was provided by his company and therefore a business expense — but she had her own. She spun in the chair once and set to tapping away on the keyboard. In a little over a minute, she had her cell records dating back a year. She called up the iCal and matched dates he’d been out of town against her records.

And there they all were — incoming calls from his cell phone when he’d been in Nome, Seattle, Portland. But they didn’t tell her anything. He could have made those calls from anywhere. So she scrolled to another week — God, that black icy week in January — incoming calls from Brian when he’d been in (or claimed to have been in) Moscow, Belgrade, Minsk. And there in the fifth column of the bill were the international long-distance charges she’d accrued for answering those calls. Not small charges either (Why was she getting charged for answering her phone? She needed a new provider), but sizable ones. Ones that correlated with calls made from the other side of the world.

As she clicked back over to the British Airways site, her phone vibrated. Brian.

“Hey,” she said.

An elongated hiss followed by two soft pops.

And then his voice. “Hey, babe.”

“Hey,” she said again.

“I’m—”

“Where are—?”

“What?”

“—you?”

“I’m in the customs line. And my phone’s about to die.”

Her relief at hearing his voice was immediately replaced with irritation. “They didn’t have an outlet in first class? On British Airways?”

“They did but mine didn’t work. You okay?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sure?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I dunno. You just sound... tight.”

“Must be the connection.”

He didn’t say anything for a bit. And then: “Okay.”

“How’s the customs line?”

“Massive. I’m taking a guess but I’m pretty sure a Swiss Air flight and an Emirates flight arrived the same time as us.”

Another bit of dead air.

“So,” she said, “I met with Melissa today.”

“Yeah?”

“And after? I was walking on—”

She heard a series of beep-clicks .

“Phone’s dying, babe. I’m really sorry. Call you from the ho—”

The line went dead.

Had it sounded like customs in the background? What did customs sound like? It had been a while since she’d been out of the country. She tried to picture it. She was pretty sure a ding went off when a checkpoint became open. But she couldn’t remember if it was a soft ding or a loud one. Either way, she hadn’t heard any dings during their conversation. But if the line was long enough, and Brian was still at the back of it, maybe he wasn’t close enough to the checkpoints for the dings to be heard.

What else had she heard? Just a general hubbub. No distinct conversations. Plenty of people didn’t talk in lines, particularly after a long flight. They were too tired. Too knackered, as Brian sometimes said with a faux British accent.

She stared out the window through the rain at the Monet version of the Charles and Cambridge beyond. Not all its shapes were foreign to her. Downriver she could discern the spiky amorphous sprawl of the Stata Center, a complex of brightly colored aluminum and titanium buildings that called to mind an implosion. Usually she abhorred modern architecture, but she had an inexplicable fondness for the Stata. Something about its haphazard lunacy seemed inspired. Back upriver, she could identify the dome of the main building at MIT, and farther still, the spire of the Memorial Church at Harvard Yard.

She’d had lunch in the Yard a few times with Brian. It was just a few blocks from his office and he’d met her there their first summer together, sometimes with burgers from Charlie’s Kitchen or pizza from Pinocchio’s. His office was about as unassuming as they came, six rooms on the third floor of a nondescript three-story brick building on Winthrop Street that looked as if it belonged in an old mill town like Brockton or Waltham far more than in the backyard of one of the most elite universities in the world. A small gold plate outside the main door identified it as Delacroix Timber Ltd. She’d been there three times, maybe four, and outside of Brian and his junior partner, Caleb, she couldn’t name the other employees or recall much about them except that they were young and cute, males and females, with the avid eyes of the ambitious. Interns mostly, Brian had told her, hoping to prove their mettle and get promoted to a paying position on the mother ship in Vancouver.

Brian Delacroix’s break from his family had always been a personal one, he explained to Rachel, never a professional one. He liked the lumber business. He was good at it. When his uncle, who’d run the U.S. operation from offices on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, dropped dead of a stroke while walking his dog through Central Park one night, Brian — never a source of disappointment to his family, just one of confusion — stepped into the role. After a year, he found Manhattan to be too much — “You can’t turn it off,” he’d say — and moved the operation to Cambridge.

She looked at the clock in the upper right corner of her laptop: 4:02 P.M. There’d still be someone at the office. Caleb, at the very least, who worked like a madman. Rachel could pop over, tell Caleb Brian had left something behind in his office and asked her to retrieve it. Once there, she could hop on his computer or take a peek through the credit card statements in his files. Make sure everything added up.

Was it a crime to suddenly and wholly mistrust your husband? She wondered this as she tried to hail a cab on Commonwealth.

It wasn’t a crime or even a sin, but it didn’t speak to a rock-solid foundation in their marriage, either. How could she mistrust him this fast, after she’d been singing his praises just this afternoon to Melissa? Their marriage, unlike those of so many of their friends, was strong.

Wasn’t it?

What was a strong marriage? What was a good marriage? She knew terrible people who had wonderful marriages, glued together somehow in their terribleness. And she knew fine, fine people who’d stood before God and all their friends to profess their undying love to each other only to toss that love on a slag heap a few years later. In the end, no matter how good they were — or thought they were — usually all that remained of the love they’d so publicly professed was vitriol, regret, and a kind of awed dismay at how dark the roads they’d ventured down became by the end.

A marriage, her mother often said, was only as strong as your next fight.

Rachel didn’t believe that. Or didn’t want to. Not when it came to her and Brian. When it came to her and Sebastian, that had definitely been true, but she and Sebastian were a disaster from the start. She and Brian were anything but.

Yet in the absence of a logical reason why she would stumble across a man who looked like her husband and was dressed identically slipping out of the back of a building in Boston when her husband was supposed to be on a flight to London, she had to go with the only rational answer — that the man exiting the Hancock early this afternoon had been Brian. Which meant he wasn’t in London. Which meant he was lying.

She flagged down a cab.

I don’t want him to be lying, she thought as the cab crossed the BU bridge and rounded the rotary to turn onto Memorial Drive. I don’t want to believe any of this. I want to feel exactly as I did this weekend — in love and in trust.