Second Wife

Chapter 10 — Beth’s Eyes

The café was nearly empty on Thursday, just the two of them and a barista with headphones who wiped the same table for twenty minutes. Rain needled the windows. Beth had chosen a booth in the back, and she’d already ordered — two lattes, oat milk for Anna, waiting on the table like a peace offering, or a summons.

“I need to tell you something,” Beth had said, in her text.

Anna had spent the whole drive rehearsing both versions. *She’s going to tell me she’s leaving town. She’s going to tell me she’s sick.* The one version she hadn’t rehearsed was the one she feared most: *She’s going to tell me she knows I know.*

“Okay,” Beth said now, wrapping both hands around her cup. “So. The thing is —” She stopped. She laughed, a short, nervous sound, nothing like her low, surprised laugh. “God, I don’t know why this is hard.”

Anna’s heart was hammering so loud she was sure Beth could hear it. “You can tell me anything,” she said. And thought: *Please don’t. Please do.*

Beth took a breath. “Craig and I are having problems.”

The words landed like a stone in still water. Anna blinked. “What kind of problems?”

“The traveling.” Beth stared into her latte. “He’s gone all the time. And when he’s home, he’s — not. You know?” She looked up, and her river-water eyes were bright with something Anna couldn’t name. “Last month he told me he was in Indianapolis for three days, and I called the hotel — don’t look at me like that, I know — and they’d never heard of him. He wasn’t there, Anna. He just wasn’t there.”

Anna’s notebook burned behind her ribs. *Indianapolis, Mon–Wed. Same week as Tuesday trip.*

“Maybe he stayed somewhere else,” Anna said carefully.

“Maybe.” Beth’s voice was flat. “Or maybe he’s lying to me, and has been for a while, and I’m the last person in this town to figure it out.” She laughed again, brittle this time. “The other moms at school pickup — they give me this look. This *poor Beth* look. Like they know something I don’t.”

Anna reached across the table and covered Beth’s hand with her own. It was instinct. It was also the strangest thing she’d ever done — comforting the woman her husband had married, over the lies he told them both.

“I’m sorry,” Anna said. And meant it, and hated that she meant it.

“Don’t be.” Beth turned her hand over and squeezed Anna’s fingers. “I’m not telling you because I want sympathy. I’m telling you because I don’t know who else to say it to. Because you’re the only person in my life right now who doesn’t give me that look.”

Anna felt the words like a hand around her throat. “What look?”

“The look that says they know.” Beth’s smile wavered. “Do you ever get the feeling, Anna, that everyone in the world is in on something, and you’re the only one who wasn’t invited?”

Anna thought of the laundry room. The notebook. The matchbook from Fairview in Craig’s briefcase, photographed and replaced. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I know that feeling.”

“Then you understand why I had to tell someone.” Beth pulled her hand back and wrapped it around her cup again, as if anchoring herself. “I keep going over it. The missed birthdays. The anniversaries he ‘couldn’t get back for.’ The way he checks his phone under the table like it’s a second heartbeat.” She let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “Eli asked me last week if Dad has another family. Nine years old, Anna. He said it the way kids say things they overheard and only half understood. I told him not to be silly.”

Anna’s chest tightened. “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Then why does he need two suitcases?’”

The rain needled the windows harder. “I didn’t have an answer for him,” Beth whispered. “I still don’t.”

Anna wanted to tell her. God, she wanted to — the words were right there, stacked up behind her teeth like water behind a dam. *I know. I know about the wedding. I know about the hotel in Indianapolis. I know because he’s my husband too.*

But Twist of fate or instinct or something older than either of them held her tongue. Because Beth was *telling* her. Voluntarily. A woman who suspected her husband of a second life was confiding in the one person who could confirm it — and she didn’t know that. She was handing Anna a weapon and calling it a conversation.

Unless she did know.

That thought slid into Anna’s mind like a knife between ribs. The dropped wallet at the playground. The door left open. The way Beth had said, weeks ago at the library, *you seem like a woman who’s looking for something.*

Anna studied Beth’s face the way Beth was studying hers.

“Beth,” Anna said, “what do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know.” Beth’s voice was very small. “I just — I look at you, and I think, here’s a woman who understands. Who sees things.” She stopped. She looked at Anna, really looked, the way she’d looked at the playground, the way she’d looked over the tiny library table.

And then Beth did something Anna would replay for weeks. She went still. Completely, unnaturally still. Her eyes searched Anna’s face — not the way a friend searches, but the way a person searches a room they thought they knew, checking every corner.

Anna felt the blood drain from her face. She tried to look away. She couldn’t.

“Beth?” she whispered.

Beth didn’t answer. The rain needled the windows. The barista wiped the table. Somewhere, an espresso machine hissed. And Beth just looked at her — looked and looked, with those river-water eyes, gray and deep and far too knowing — and Anna felt the whole careful structure of the last three weeks begin to tilt, the research and the notebook and the laundry room and the wedding photo in the wallet, all of it sliding toward the edge of a table.

Anna thought about lying. She’d gotten good at it — weeks of practice, smiling over chicken piccata, pouring wine, asking about Greg Henderson. She could do it now. She could say *what?* with the perfect blank face of a woman who knew nothing.

But Beth’s eyes wouldn’t let her. They held her the way a hand holds your wrist — not hard, but certain.

“Anna,” Beth said quietly.

And then, after a long, long moment:

“You know, don’t you?”