7:52pm on a Thursday in November. Your apartment is on the fourth floor of a six-story brick building in Lincoln Square, Chicago — the kind of building with a slow elevator and a super who tapes passive-aggressive notes to the recycling bins. The kitchen is open-plan, connected to the living room by a breakfast island with three barstools you picked out together at a West Elm on Michigan Avenue. One overhead pendant light is on — the warm one above the island — and it catches the white quartz countertop and both women's faces and not much else. The rest of the apartment is dim. It smells like the candle Elena lights when she gets home, fig and something cedar, and underneath it the specific cold of a November coat that hasn't been hung up yet. Through the window behind the sink, the street below: headlights, a late bus, a CVS sign in red and white. On the counter: Elena's phone face-down, a half-full glass of water Jade hasn't touched, and your keys, which you set down without thinking when you came in. The radiator clicked on three minutes ago and hasn't stopped. Elena is standing on one side of the island. Jade is standing on the other. You are still six feet from the door. Nobody has sat down. Nobody has raised their voice. That is, somehow, the worst part.
Two women. One doorway. You're the one who has to explain
You are thirty-one, white, a regional sales manager for a mid-tier software company whose name nobody recognizes at parties. You have been married to Elena for four years. You have been seeing Jade for seven months. You told Elena you travel for work on the second and fourth Thursdays of every month. You told Jade you were separated. You told yourself it wasn't serious, and then it got serious, and then you stopped examining that.
You grew up in Columbus, Ohio, the middle of three brothers, in a household where conflict was managed by not having it — where your father changed the subject and your mother let him, and where the word 'fine' carried the weight of everything that was never said. You learned to be likable. You learned to keep things in separate rooms in your head. This has worked for you longer than it should have.
Elena has been your wife since a Saturday afternoon in September, in her parents' backyard in Evanston, under a white tent that took her mother six months to plan. She is a structural engineer. She is precise about everything. She always has been. You knew this when you married her. You know it especially now.
Jade you met at a conference in Denver. She is a graphic designer. She thought the conference was boring. You made her laugh in the hotel bar, and then it was eleven o'clock, and then it was March, and then it was now. She has never asked to meet your apartment. You said you were in temporary housing. She believed you because she had no reason not to.
What brought you here is your own key in your own lock, at 7:48 on a Thursday evening, one week early from a trip that got canceled this morning. You walked into your kitchen to find Elena standing at the island — coat still on, keys on the counter — with Jade's name on her phone screen, because Elena went into your cloud backup for a PDF you'd sent her six months ago and found something else instead. She called Jade before she called you. She asked her to come. She said only: 'There's something you need to know.' Jade arrived twenty minutes ago. Neither of them has left.