And then the picture started to clear. Ian’s hints, his inability to say it directly.
“About three years ago there was a guy. He wasn’t from the country club. She met him—” He cleared his throat, lifting his fist to his mouth. “They met through a group she belonged to at church, of all things. It never got serious, I don’t think. It’s funny that in some ways that makes it worse. I mean, maybe it would be easier to swallow if they really loved each other or something, but this was apparently only about sex.”
Jenna looked down at the nearly empty salad bowl. The remains of her lunch, greens and a few vegetables sitting in oil, looked so unappealing she couldn’t stand to think she’d just eaten most of it.
“It ended,” he said. “I found out when we bought new phones. She still had the texts right there. Times to meet and all that. I can tell you don’t believe me.”
“She never said a word. . . .”
“Did her behavior change three years ago, in the summer? Did you notice anything different about her?”
Three years. Around the time Celia and Ian joined the country club, around the time Jenna and Celia started seeing less of each other. Did their drifting apart begin in the summer? She couldn’t say. She didn’t answer Ian’s question.
“We got it together after that. Mostly.” The look in his eyes seemed far away. “I thought we were moving in the right direction at least. For a while, we spent more time together. We went away on that trip. You remember?”
“Europe. Ursula stayed with your mother.”
“We were fine. Good, even. We were getting somewhere, I thought.”
“And then?” Jenna asked.
“Then she disappeared.” He said the word casually, without any special emphasis or hesitation. Disappeared. It was a fact of life for both of them. “I never knew for sure about the most recent affair. I suspected it in the weeks leading up to her disappearance, but I didn’t know with certainty. The police brought it up again over the last few days. They keep turning the same earth hoping something new appears. I’m sure that’s why Poole tracked you down and asked you the marriage question again. I can even see the smug look on her face when she asked you, like she was the all-knowing schoolteacher leading a precocious student toward a lesson.”
“That is what she looked like.”
“I don’t know what they’re thinking. They won’t say, which seems ridiculous to me. I should be able to know as much about my wife’s case as I can possibly know. Maybe they’re so desperate for a lead they’re just shaking the trees to see what falls out. The guy . . .” His voice dripped with distaste. “Some dentist who lives about twenty miles away from here, in Youngblood or someplace like that. I didn’t listen much to the details. They hurt too much. Talk about getting kicked in the balls. But she’d been involved with him for a little while. A month or so, at least from what they can tell.”
“So this guy, this dentist, he might be—”
“They cleared him. I asked the same thing. He has an alibi for that time. It’s rock solid. He was with a group of his friends in a bar. Twenty people saw him. I wish it was different. . . .”
“I’m sure the cops wished it went that way too. But maybe one of these guys was following her. . . .”
“They’ve been through it all, Jenna. It’s humiliating. Try having to go over your wife’s two affairs with the cops.”
“Ugh,” Jenna said. “But if this is true about Celia and this dentist . . . how did you not know about it when it was happening?”
Ian smiled again, the same weak, wistful smile. “Celia could have been in the CIA apparently. They used some kind of throwaway cell phones, the ones drug dealers use. No paper or electronic trail. I worked a lot. We’d drifted some.”
His gaze trailed out the window. Jenna followed it and didn’t see anything worth noting. Ian appeared lost in his own thoughts, and she struggled with hers. She’d missed so much of Celia’s life, and that life might be over. And again she wondered about the role she could have played if she had known everything that was going on with her friend.
But then she came back to the important questions at hand. “Did anybody else know about it? The thing with the dentist?”
“You think I haven’t been thinking about that for the last week? You think I haven’t been through every name of every person we knew?” Ian looked at his watch. “I can’t look at anybody the same way again.”
Jenna studied Ian’s profile as he continued to stare out the window. “Is that the only reason you agreed to come out to meet me? To ask me what I knew? After you haven’t said a word to me for months?”
He turned back to face her, a look on his face she couldn’t read.
“You could have spoken to me a long time ago. Let me apologize or something. Instead I waited . . .”