“Okay,” I said. “Love you.”
He didn’t answer. He never answered anymore, when I said it. I’d stopped noticing that too.
I set my phone down beside Sophie’s bottle on the counter, and I was reaching to warm the bottle, when I noticed the screen was still lit. The call timer was still running. Elon hadn’t hung up. He’d taken the phone away from his ear, thought he’d ended the call, and set it down somewhere with the line still open.
I was about to end it myself. My thumb was moving toward the button. And then I heard a sound come through the speaker, small and tinny, and it stopped my hand.
A woman’s laugh.
Close to the phone. Intimate. The laugh of a woman who was somewhere private with the man on the other end of my line.
And then I heard my husband’s voice, relaxed now, warm, the charm switched back on, aimed at someone who wasn’t me.
“She’s driving me insane,” Elon said. “Texting me pictures of the baby all day, asking when I’ll be home, checking up on me constantly. I just want her to leave me alone. I swear to God.”
My fingers went numb around the phone.
The woman murmured something I couldn’t make out.
Elon laughed. An easy, comfortable laugh, the laugh of a man who was exactly where he wanted to be.
“Of course I hate her,” he said. “I can barely stand to be in the same house. I barely even touch her anymore, haven’t in months. It’s all just, ugh.” A pause. “Just wait, okay? Be patient. I’ll divorce her, and then I’ll marry you. I promise. It’s just, with the baby, the timing has to be right. But I’ll do it. It’s you I want.”
And then, through the speaker, unmistakable, the small wet sound of a kiss.
I could not move. I stood in my kitchen with my daughter on my hip and my husband’s voice in my ear telling another woman that he hated me, that he wanted to leave me, that he’d barely touched me in months because he was touching her, and the whole floor of my life dropped away beneath me.
With my free hand, moving very carefully, very quietly, as though he might hear me through the phone he didn’t know was open, I ended the call.
