The same way she’d seen the rest of him, she realized—reflected in the glass. She’d first seen his face, the coat and pullover. Then, as the confusion set in, she’d caught the back of him as he stepped into the car, ducking his head under the doorframe, pulling the flap of the coat in after him. In the moment, she hadn’t realized she’d seen all that, but on the walk home, it reassembled for her. So, yes, the Refracted Man (or Scott Pfeiffer of Grafton, Vermont) had been wearing the same color jeans Brian had left the house in. Same jeans, same coat, same sweater, same color T-shirt.
In the apartment, she half talked herself out of it again. Coincidences did happen in this life. She dried her hair and went into the spare bedroom he often used as his home office. She called his cell. It went directly to voice mail. Made sense. He was either still in the air or had just landed. Made perfect sense.
An ash-blond desk sat before a window that looked out across the river at MIT and Cambridge. They were high enough that on a clear day they could make out Arlington and parts of Medford if they put in the effort. Now, though, behind the sheets of rain, it was an impressionist painting, the buildings retaining their shapes but stripped of all specificity. Normally Brian’s laptop sat here, but of course he’d taken it on his trip with him. She put her own laptop there and considered her options. She tried his cell a second time. Voice mail.
His primary credit cards, an Amex and a mileage-plus Visa, were business cards. The records were at his offices, which were through the soup and across the river in Cambridge, just on the edge of Harvard Square.
The statements on their personal credit cards, however, were easily accessible. She brought the one for the Mastercard up on her screen. She went back three months and found nothing out of the ordinary, so she went back six. All ordinary purchases. What had she been expecting to find? If she did find some irregularity, the inexplicable purchase, the mystery website, would it turn out to be clear evidence he was in Copley Square early this afternoon when he was supposed to be in London? Or would it just turn out to be proof he surfed porn sites or that her last birthday present hadn’t been tucked away a month early as he’d claimed but had actually been purchased in a mad scramble that morning?
She didn’t even find that.
She went to the British Airways site and checked arrival information on Flight 422, Logan to Heathrow.
Delayed departure due to weather.
Expected arrival: 8:25 pm (GMT +1).
That was fifteen minutes from now.
She checked their ATM statements and found no large cash withdrawals. With some guilt she realized the last time he’d used the card had been as a point-of-sale purchase—the necklace he’d bought her at the mall.
She looked at her cell, willing it to vibrate, for “Brian” to show up in the caller ID. Somehow he’d clear this whole thing up. She’d finish the phone call laughing at her own paranoia.
Wait. Cell phone records. Of course. She didn’t have his—his cell phone was provided by his company and therefore a business expense—but she had her own. She spun in the chair once and set to tapping away on the keyboard. In a little over a minute, she had her cell records dating back a year. She called up the iCal and matched dates he’d been out of town against her records.
And there they all were—incoming calls from his cell phone when he’d been in Nome, Seattle, Portland. But they didn’t tell her anything. He could have made those calls from anywhere. So she scrolled to another week—God, that black icy week in January—incoming calls from Brian when he’d been in (or claimed to have been in) Moscow, Belgrade, Minsk. And there in the fifth column of the bill were the international long-distance charges she’d accrued for answering those calls. Not small charges either (Why was she getting charged for answering her phone? She needed a new provider), but sizable ones. Ones that correlated with calls made from the other side of the world.
As she clicked back over to the British Airways site, her phone vibrated. Brian.
“Hey,” she said.
An elongated hiss followed by two soft pops.
And then his voice. “Hey, babe.”
“Hey,” she said again.
“I’m—”
“Where are—?”
“What?”
“—you?”
“I’m in the customs line. And my phone’s about to die.”
Her relief at hearing his voice was immediately replaced with irritation. “They didn’t have an outlet in first class? On British Airways?”
“They did but mine didn’t work. You okay?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sure?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I dunno. You just sound . . . tight.”
“Must be the connection.”
He didn’t say anything for a bit. And then: “Okay.”
“How’s the customs line?”
“Massive. I’m taking a guess but I’m pretty sure a Swiss Air flight and an Emirates flight arrived the same time as us.”
Another bit of dead air.
“So,” she said, “I met with Melissa today.”
“Yeah?”
“And after? I was walking on—”
She heard a series of beep-clicks.
“Phone’s dying, babe. I’m really sorry. Call you from the ho—”
The line went dead.
Had it sounded like customs in the background? What did customs sound like? It had been a while since she’d been out of the country. She tried to picture it. She was pretty sure a ding went off when a checkpoint became open. But she couldn’t remember if it was a soft ding or a loud one. Either way, she hadn’t heard any dings during their conversation. But if the line was long enough, and Brian was still at the back of it, maybe he wasn’t close enough to the checkpoints for the dings to be heard.
What else had she heard? Just a general hubbub. No distinct conversations. Plenty of people didn’t talk in lines, particularly after a long flight. They were too tired. Too knackered, as Brian sometimes said with a faux British accent.
She stared out the window through the rain at the Monet version of the Charles and Cambridge beyond. Not all its shapes were foreign to her. Downriver she could discern the spiky amorphous sprawl of the Stata Center, a complex of brightly colored aluminum and titanium buildings that called to mind an implosion. Usually she abhorred modern architecture, but she had an inexplicable fondness for the Stata. Something about its haphazard lunacy seemed inspired. Back upriver, she could identify the dome of the main building at MIT, and farther still, the spire of the Memorial Church at Harvard Yard.