I tightened my grip on the sign. “Excuse me?”
“You really don’t understand anything, do you?”
Something about the way she said it made my stomach tighten. “What does that mean?”
She looked at me. “Twenty-seven years, Claire. You had twenty-seven years with that man, and you still couldn’t see what was right under your nose.”
For the first time since I’d stepped onto her lawn, I forgot about the apples. My mind went back to the photographs I’d found that morning, every strange look Monica had given Daniel. “Were you sleeping with my husband?”
Monica’s face hardened. “No.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying. I was never Daniel’s mistress. Not once during your marriage.”
“Then how did you know about the red light?”
Her jaw tightened. “Because he was on his way to see me.”
I stared at her. “What?”
“We were supposed to meet that night. He never showed up. Later, I found out he’d taken some woman he’d hit in a crosswalk to the hospital.”
Some woman.
Me.
I suddenly understood why Monica had known the one detail Daniel and I had kept between ourselves all those years.
“You were dating him.”
“Yes.”
“And after he met me?”
“He ended it.”
Her voice held no triumph. Still, something didn’t fit.
I looked at Monica’s house. The house she’d inherited from her parents and moved back into nine years earlier. The house from which she’d watched our children grow up and Daniel work in his garden.
I stepped closer. “You say you weren’t his mistress. Fine. Then why spend all these years watching my husband, my children, our life? Why steal his harvest twelve days after he died?”
For the first time, Monica had no answer.
Her eyes flicked toward the house.
It was tiny.
Barely a movement.
But I saw it.
I followed her gaze toward the front door.
The screen door opened.
