Derek held the edge of the counter. Fourteen thousand dollars. A transmission. A month of mortgage if they had had a mortgage. Mason’s summer. The number was not the betrayal and it was not nothing. It was a second map of the marriage, with a road on it he had not been shown. He thought of the jar on the fridge with its taped label, CAR, in his own printing, and the way Lauren had put a twenty in it last Sunday and kissed his cheek. The kiss had been real. The twenty had been real. The account had also been real. People could do several true things at once and still be unjust.
“I want the statements,” he said. “Not because I’m going to take his money. Because I am done being surprised by paper in this house.”
“Tonight,” she said. “The box is downstairs. You can tear the basement apart. I won’t blame you.”
“I don’t need your permission to look at my own house.”
“I know.”
They stood in it, the knowledge, which did not warm the room. Jonah drank his water at last. His hand was steady. Derek saw that steadiness and recognized it as the kind you build when you have already fallen apart somewhere else, on a bus, in a bathroom, in a room that is not yours. He felt a reluctant, unwelcome kinship with it.