At 2:00 in the morning, I stayed completely motionless while my husband emptied our safe, certain that I was deeply asleep.
Before he left, Ryan bent over me, kissed my forehead, and whispered:
“Poor Claire. You never saw any of this coming.”
I waited until I heard the front door shut.
Then I opened my eyes.
Ryan had made one serious mistake.
I had been waiting for that exact night for 3 weeks.
It had started only a few hours earlier, when he came upstairs to our bedroom carrying a cup of tea.
“You look exhausted. Drink this and get some sleep.”
Ryan never made tea for me.
He probably couldn’t even have told you where we kept the tea bags.
I took a tiny sip and immediately noticed something odd.
A faint bitterness.
I couldn’t prove anything had been added to it, but after months of suspicious transfers, business trips that didn’t make sense, and phone calls that suddenly ended whenever I entered a room, I had learned one important lesson.
When something doesn’t fit, you don’t force it into place.
You watch it.
