ROB

Three hours earlier

Most of the time, the first thing I do when I get home is take a shower.

Claudia requires it. Not that it’s a terrible idea. When you’re working on people’s toilets, you get your hands dirty. Claudia claims there’s grease and grime permanently ground into the creases of my hands but that’s not true. I can get them clean if I want. If I scrub for a long time.

Today was the kind of job where you come home and want to shower right away. There was a clog in the pipe that just wouldn’t come free. I worked at it forever before I figured out what it was. It was a dead rat.

No, not a dead rat. A frozen dead rat.

Half a frozen dead rat.

So when I walk through the front door of my house, yeah, I want to shower. And after that, a nice dinner with Claudia. Although that’s one of those things that’s gotten more and more rare lately. Everything is a fight these days. I don’t even know why. I work hard all day, and all I want to do is go home and relax at the end of the day with a nice cold beer. You think I want to fight with my wife? I don’t.

The house is dark when I get inside. I swear Claudia told me she didn’t have any clients this afternoon. On account of the snow.

“Claudia?” I call out. No answer.

I don’t know where she could be. Maybe she’s looking for Quinn, although I don’t know why she thinks she’ll be

better at it than the police. Unless she knows something she’s not telling me, which might be true.

I don’t get Claudia’s relationship with Quinn. Quinn is fine. She’s nice enough. Quiet compared with my wife. Her husband is an asshole, but who cares? Claudia spends so much time with Quinn, but sometimes I wonder if they even like each other.

Claudia is always whining about Quinn. To be fair, she whines about everything. But especially about Quinn. Quinn’s fake blond hair. Quinn’s giant house. How Quinn wouldn’t give us any money to help when our roof collapsed last year and wrecked our attic.

Not that we need money from the Alexanders. I do fine as a plumber. It’s a very good living. Maybe I’m not rich like Derek Alexander, but I could afford to fix my own damn roof. I didn’t want their charity. I wouldn’t have taken the money if they offered it.

I head up the stairs, trying not to think about where Claudia might be. I don’t even know if I care. There was a time when I might have come home and told her about the rat in the pipe and she would have laughed. But these days, she wouldn’t want to hear it.

I strip off my dirty clothing and go straight in the shower. I turn it up as hot as it gets, so hot I might get second-degree burns, but it will be worth it. It’s cold outside. And I installed a shower nozzle to improve the pressure. It was Claudia’s request, but I think I like it more than she does.

The water runs over my hair, which admittedly, isn’t much to speak of lately. Claudia likes to point out I’m losing my hair, and that it makes me look like an old man. It’s a favorite topic of hers. I told her I’ll just shave it all off, but she doesn’t want that either. I don’t know what the hell she wants.

My head is throbbing dully from the stress of getting that goddamn rat out of the pipe. I reach for my forehead

and my fingers graze the scar on my hairline. I got that scar a year ago, and it still throbs sometimes. Claudia and I were in a fight—yelling and screaming, and yes, throwing things. I can’t even remember what the fight was about, but she picked up a paperweight and threw it at my head. Five stitches.

She felt bad about it though. Drove me to the ER. Was real nice for a good few weeks after. No fighting.

When I climb out of the shower, I wrap a towel around my waist and stare at my reflection in the mirror. I look tired. Yeah, I’m losing my hair, but I don’t look that different from the day Claudia and I met. But somehow, she’s gotten sick of looking at me.

I tap the medicine cabinet open. We got a lot of pill bottles in there. I don’t know what the hell half of them are

—they all belong to Claudia. I rifle through half full bottles and finally find the Tylenol. I shake two of them into my hand and swallow them dry. Maybe that will help with the headache.

When I get out of the bathroom, it’s strangely quiet. “Claudia?” I call out.

No answer.

Claudia still isn’t home. Where the hell is she? It’s getting late. Usually we have dinner around now.

I throw on some clothes, and while I’m buttoning my jeans, I hear a ding from the hallway. It’s the dryer. Before Claudia left for wherever she was going, she must’ve put a load of clothes in the dryer.

That’s another problem Claudia’s got with me. I never do the wash. Whenever I bring up having a baby, she always says that. How are you going to help me take care of a baby if you won’t even do the laundry? I don’t know what one thing has to do with the other. Everyone else I know who got married when we did has a kid or two by now. What are we waiting for?

But if I need to do the laundry to prove myself to her, hell, I’ll do it. I don’t mind. It’s easier than getting a dead rat out of a pipe.

I go out to the hallway where our washer and dryer are set up. I take the load out of the dryer—it’s mostly Claudia’s stuff. Shirts and scrubs. I almost think maybe I shouldn’t do it because I’ll fold her shirts wrong, and that will be another thing I did wrong today. You can’t win. But then I say to hell with it. Better to try.

I fold Claudia’s shirts the best I can. I build a little stack of them on our bed, and I’m almost proud of it. I recognize a lot of the shirts. She still has that shirt with the silhouette of the Eiffel tower on it. She wore that the day we met. I remember because I liked how she had the French name and the French shirt.

I just liked her though. Mostly that.

I do a good job with the folding. I mean, it’s a nice little pile of shirts. I think I folded them right. She’ll be happy. She’s got to be happy with this, for once.

Claudia keeps her shirts in the big dresser in our bedroom. I open up the drawer and push some of the clothing aside to make room for the neatly folded clean shirts. And that’s when something falls out of the pile of shirts that was already in the drawer.

It’s a phone.

I pick it up and turn it over in my hand. It’s a burner phone. One of those phones you get when you don’t want somebody to track you.

What the hell is my wife doing with a burner phone?

I flip it open. I notice a bunch of missed calls on the screen. I think about calling the number back, but I don’t. I want to know what the deal is with this phone first, before I start calling a number and acting like an idiot.

There are a bunch of text messages on the phone. All from the same number. I open up the most recent one:

I can’t wait to see you.

What the…?

I sink onto the bed as I read through the text messages one by one. It gets much worse.

She just went out. See you soon!

Rob won’t be home till late. Come over. I can’t wait to get you naked.

You’re all I can think about.

Well, great. Claudia is messing around with another guy. Am I surprised? I don’t even know. Am I pissed off? Hell yes. How could she? How could she do something like that to me? To us? I knew she wasn’t happy with me, but what the hell? We could’ve talked it out. Marriage counseling or

some shit like that.

I squeeze the phone, feeling it almost crack in my hand. I want to throw it across the room and watch it shatter. I know I shouldn’t. This is the only evidence I have that she’s been messing around on me. But the urge is almost too strong.

And then the phone rings.