I reached in and pulled out a black velvet box. It was small, the size of a ring box.
I turned around. Richard was watching me, a flicker of uncertainty finally cracking his mask of arrogance. Marissa looked up, her eyes wide with fear.
I walked back to the center of the room. I stopped three feet from my husband. I looked him in the eye—really looked at him. I saw the lines around his mouth that I had kissed a thousand times. I saw the eyes that I thought held affection, now revealing only a bottomless well of narcissism.
I smiled.
It wasn’t a happy smile. It was a small, deliberate, unsettling curvature of the lips. It was the smile of a predator who has just realized the cage door is open.
“I knew,” I said.
My voice was clear. It carried to the back of the room, to the kitchen where the servers had stopped working to listen.
“This,” I said, extending the box, “is for you. Happy birthday to me.”
Richard blinked. He looked at the box, then at me. “Eleanor? What…?”
“Take it,” I commanded.
He took the box. His fingers brushed mine, and for the first time in decades, I felt no spark, no comfort. Just the repulsion one feels when touching something unclean.
His hands were trembling now. The confidence was leaking out of him like air from a punctured tire.
He lifted the lid.
The color didn’t just drain from his face; it vanished, leaving him looking gray and embalmed. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. He staggered back a step, gripping the velvet box as if it contained a scorpion.
The guests leaned in, craning their necks.
Inside the box sat a simple, silver USB drive.
That was all. Just a piece of plastic and metal. But to Richard, it was a guillotine blade.
“Eleanor,” he whispered, his voice barely audible over the hum of the refrigerator in the next room. “How… how did you get this?”
“How?” I repeated, my tone conversational, almost light. “The same way you built your second life, Richard. With money. And silence.”
Three months ago, a credit card statement had arrived. It was for a card I didn’t recognize—a Centurion card under Richard’s name. It had been misdelivered to our neighbor, who handed it to me while I was gardening.
Normally, I would have left it on Richard’s desk. But I saw the total due: $45,000.
I opened it.
Jewelry stores. Tuition payments for a private school in Vermont. Hotel suites in the city on nights he claimed to be working late.
I didn’t confront him. I didn’t cry. I sat in my garden, amongst my hydrangeas, and I realized that the unease I had felt for years—the distance, the guarded phone, the mysterious withdrawals—wasn’t paranoia. It was intuition.
I hired Apex Investigative Services. I told the investigator, a grim man named Mr. Vance, “I want everything. Don’t leave a single stone unturned.”
He hadn’t.
The USB drive in Richard’s hand contained gigabytes of destruction.
“Eleanor, please,” Richard stammered, looking frantically at the guests, at his daughters, at Marissa. “Not here. Let’s go to the study. We can talk.”
“Talk?” I laughed, a sharp, brittle sound. “You just introduced your mistress and illegitimate children to our friends during the hors d’oeuvres. I think we are past the point of private conversations.”
Lily stepped forward, her face streaked with tears. “Mom, what is on that drive?”
Richard tried to close the box, to hide it. “Nothing. Just business files. Your mother is confused.”
“I am remarkably lucid, Richard,” I said.
