She told him about the coffee shop in Plaza Midwood, the way Isaiah had looked older and softer, grief making a man out of the boy who had left her senior year with a coward's note and a emptied shared apartment. She told him about the texts that began as condolences and became jokes and became late-night messages she read in the bathroom with the fan on so Aaron would not hear the phone buzz. She told him about the first time she met Isaiah for a walk on the greenway and called it exercise. She told him about the hotel near the airport in March — she named the month because he had asked for architecture — and the way she had sat in the parking lot afterward with her forehead on the steering wheel believing she could still reverse the hour if she just did not go home smelling like someone else's soap.
Aaron listened without interrupting until she finished the first hour. Then he asked about the pickup list again. Then he asked whether Isaiah had ever driven Lily anywhere except Thursday. Then he asked whether there were photographs. Simone said no photographs she knew of. Aaron asked her to unlock her phone and hand it over. She did. He scrolled. He found the thread. He read enough to understand that the loneliness she had named was real and that the betrayal was not lessened by its psychological accuracy.
He set the phone face down on the table.
"I want him off the list Monday morning," Aaron said. "I will call the school myself. You will not speak to him in front of Lily again. You will not have him near this house. Whether I stay in this marriage is not a question I can answer tonight. Whether you have destroyed something I thought was permanent is not a question at all."
Simone nodded. Tears finally moved, quiet and untheatrical. "What do you need from me right now."
"Silence," Aaron said. "And the couch. I'll sleep downstairs."
He took a pillow and a throw blanket and lay on the living room sofa where Lily's stuffed animals still held their tribunal. He stared at the ceiling fan. He thought of Thursday — of Lily climbing into a stranger's car that was not a stranger to her, of Simone's late client call that may or may not have been real, of his own drive back from Raleigh with a podcast about leadership and a mind empty of suspicion. He thought of the teacher with the clipboard. He thought of Lily's voice: He already picked me up on Thursday.
Sleep, when it came, was thin.