My Husband’s Mistress Destroyed Our Daughter’s Last Memories

Three weeks after I buried my daughter, the house still smelled like her shampoo.

I didn't know how that was possible. The cleaners had come twice. I had washed every sheet. But when I walked past Lyla's bedroom door, the strawberry sweetness drifted out like she had just stepped from the bath, like in a moment she would pad into the hall in her pink socks and ask me to braid her hair.

I kept the door closed now. I closed it the way you close a wound.

Caspian had not slept here in nine days. Business at the club, he said. Investors. Press. The King of Cards had a brand to maintain, even in mourning. Especially in mourning. He had told me that on the phone last night, in the same tone he used to order steak.

I sat at the kitchen island with a cup of tea I had not touched. The Vegas afternoon pressed white and flat against the windows. Somewhere behind the glass, the Strip was already warming up its neon. The mountains looked like cut paper.

I kept replaying the funeral.

He had stood at the pulpit in a charcoal suit and read his eulogy from a folded card. He did not stumble. He did not look at the small white casket. When he came back down the aisle, he passed my pew and did not take my hand. He squeezed my shoulder. The way you squeeze a colleague's shoulder. The way a man pats a horse.

I had thought, at the time, that grief made people strange.

Now I wasn't sure it had been grief at all.

The phone on the counter buzzed. The insurance adjuster. Tomorrow at ten, he needed Caspian's passport for the international policy review. Could I please bring a copy.

I stood up too fast. The room tilted, then settled.

Caspian's office was at the end of the hall, all dark wood and leather and the framed photograph of him shaking hands with the governor of Nevada. The photo was angled toward the door so you saw it before you saw him. I had stopped seeing it years ago. Today I noticed it again.

The passport wasn't in the desk. It wasn't in the safe. He kept a leather travel bag in the closet, the one he took to Macau. I dragged it out and unzipped it on the rug.

Shirts. A spare watch. A small bottle of his cologne, the bergamot one I bought him for our fifth anniversary. I ran my hand along the inside lining out of habit, the way I used to check Lyla's coat pockets for tissues.

My fingers caught on something hard.

A seam, opened and resewn. A pocket I had never put there.

I worked it loose with my thumbnail. A phone slid out into my palm. Black, plastic, cheap. Not his. Not any phone I had ever seen him use.

The screen lit when I pressed the button. No passcode. He had been careless, or he had been confident. With Caspian, those were the same thing.

One thread of messages. Two years long. The contact name was a single letter.

R.

I sat down on the closet floor.

The first message was from a Tuesday in March, two springs ago. Lyla had been four. I had been making her a costume for the school play, a paper crown with gold glitter that got into everything for weeks.

I read it. Then the next. Then the next.

Her name was Ryleigh. He called her sweet things at first, the kind of things he had stopped calling me somewhere around Lyla's second birthday. I had not even noticed when he stopped. That was the part that turned my stomach first, before anything else. The way I had not noticed.

Then the photographs. Her in his hotel suite in Macau. Her at the lake house we had bought for our family. Her wearing the bracelet I had assumed was a tax write-off for a client.

Then her voice, in text, getting harder.

She wants too much of you. She is dragging your luck down. I can feel it on you when you come to me. I can feel her on you.

Then, months later: The kid is the obstacle. You know that. You feel it too.

I made a sound in my throat I did not recognize.

Then his answer. Cool. Spaced over days, weighing it. Asking practical questions. How. When. Who.

I got up. I walked to the bathroom because I thought I was going to be sick, but I wasn't. I sat down on the cold marble floor with the phone in both hands and I kept reading.

The sun moved across the skylight. The tile under my legs went from cold to warm to cold again. My tea, somewhere far away in the kitchen, was a memory.

I read the last message four times before my brain agreed to translate it.

It had been sent at 7:48 in the morning. The morning of the accident. The morning I had kissed Lyla's forehead and tied the green ribbon in her hair and watched the school van roll away from our gate, and Caspian had been in the kitchen with his coffee, scrolling. He had looked up and smiled at me. He had said, You should eat something, baby.

At 7:48, while I was rinsing her cereal bowl, he had typed:

It's done. The luck is ours now.

I did not cry.

I thought I would. I thought my body would do what bodies are supposed to do. But the grief inside me had outgrown tears weeks ago. It had become something else. Something hard and quiet and load-bearing. It had replaced bone.

I sat on the bathroom floor for a long time. Long enough that the light through the skylight turned the color of a bruise.

When I finally stood, my legs barely worked. I caught myself on the sink and looked into the mirror and a woman I did not entirely recognize looked back. My wedding band was still on my finger. I had been pressing my thumb against it without knowing. The skin underneath had gone white.

I took it off. I set it on the counter. I left it there.

I walked to my bedroom on autopilot. I wanted Lyla's bear. The brown one with the missing eye she had loved more than the new ones. I kept it on the chair by the window now, because I could not bear to put it back on her bed, and I could not bear to put it away.

The chair was empty.

I checked her room. The shelf where the christening gown had been folded under glass was bare, just a clean rectangle in the dust. The framed photograph of the two of us at the lake, the one I kept on my nightstand, the one where she was laughing into my collarbone and I was laughing into her hair, was gone.

I called Caspian's assistant. A young woman named Jess. She picked up on the second ring, bright and rehearsed.

"Mrs. Howard, hi, how can I—"

"Lyla's things," I said. My voice came out level. It surprised me. "The bear. The gown. The photograph from my nightstand. Where are they."

A pause. I heard her swallow.

"Mr. Howard had them sent to the club, ma'am. For the VIP lounge. He said they were—" she searched for the word he had given her, "—display items. For an auction piece, I think? For Saturday's event."

I did not say anything.

"Mrs. Howard? Should I—"

I hung up.

I picked up my keys.

The drive downtown took twenty-two minutes. I did not turn on the radio. I did not look at the speedometer. The Strip slid past in long bands of gold and red and the dry desert wind rattled the palms along Las Vegas Boulevard.

The club sat at the corner of Fremont and Sixth, a narrow black door under a single brass sign. No name on it. If you needed the name, you didn't belong inside.

I parked across the street and turned off the engine.

I sat there a long moment, both hands on the wheel. I had not been through that door in almost four years. He had always had a reason. The air in there isn't good for you, baby. Those men aren't your kind of company. Stay home. Let me handle it.

A valet glanced at my car and looked away.

In my bag, the burner phone was still warm from my palm.

I got out. I crossed the street. I walked toward the door.