Tom didn’t wait for the door to close.
“Have you lost your mind?” he hissed. “You stood there and defended him.”
“I know what I said.” “Michael and Rachel have been talking about eloping,” he said. “They want to start a new life together at that estate.”
I stared at him. “How do you know?”
Tom lowered his voice. “I followed them last week. Rachel told me she was visiting a friend. They spent nearly an hour on the terrace, laughing and touching where anyone might see them.”
I covered my mouth, struggling to hold back a gasp.
Tom continued. “I took those pictures from my car. When I walked closer, the doors were open. I heard them talking about leaving together, but by the time I raised my phone, they’d gone back inside.”
The photographs confirmed that Rachel and Michael had been together at the estate, but they didn’t prove what the two of them were planning.
If they denied everything, a handful of pictures showing them sitting together might not be enough to protect either Tom or me during a divorce.
And now they knew Tom had discovered the estate.
They wouldn’t go back there.
“You think I’m calm?” I asked. “I’m furious. But if we confront them with this and nothing more, they’ll deny it, hide everything, and we’ll have nothing useful.”
Tom rubbed his hand over his face. “So you want to pretend you believe him?”
“For now. We need proof they can’t laugh off as a misunderstanding.”
He watched me for a moment.
Then he lowered his voice. “Rachel goes somewhere else every Friday. I’ve seen her leave, and she won’t tell me where she’s going.”
A thought immediately came to me.
“Michael says he meets the boys at a bar every Friday.”
Tom’s expression tightened. “You think they’re meeting?”
“I think we should find out.”
For several seconds, neither of us said anything.
