Carbon Copies

I smiled through the toast. I even kissed Adrian when our guests tapped their glasses. All evening I watched his hands, astonished that hands could look so familiar after their meaning had changed.

At midnight he offered to clear away the presents. I said I had a headache and went upstairs. From the landing I heard his study door close.

My father had taught me bookkeeping before Adrian taught me to consider myself bad at it. At nineteen I could find a missing payment in a month of handwritten entries. At thirty-four I needed permission, apparently, to question a letter bearing my own name.

I waited until Adrian’s breathing settled beside me. Then I went to the kitchen and searched the recycling.

There were no papers from his study, only bottles and ribbon. He had a shredder. Of course he had a shredder.

But Ruth’s notice had been wet. Its folded corner had touched the sleeve of my cream blouse, leaving a faint blue rectangle. I put the blouse on the table as though it might confess something.

At breakfast I asked whether Bellwether’s boiler had finally been replaced.

“Last winter,” Adrian said, looking at his phone. “You remember.”

I remembered authorizing the expense. I did not remember seeing the boiler.

After he left, I called Ruth using the number I found beside her husband’s name in my father’s old tenant ledger. She answered on the fourth ring.

“I’d like to see your notice again,” I said.

“Will he come with you?”

“No.”

She agreed to meet at the public library, not the house. I understood her choice when she arrived carrying a folder thick with unanswered letters. Rent receipts. Photographs of a leaking ceiling. A tenancy agreement promising another eighteen months.

On the last page of the eviction notice, my signature sat beside a witness’s name: Daniel Pike.

Daniel was Adrian’s solicitor. At our wedding he had caught my bouquet as a joke and bowed to the room.

I copied every page with Ruth’s permission, paying for the machine with coins. Then I bought a small notebook from the library shop.

On the first page I wrote three headings: What I know. What I can prove. What I still believe.

For a long time, the last heading remained empty.