Page 78 of Sweet Ruin

I highlight it, write the date on the legal pad, and keep going.

Backwards through time. The statements are organized from most recent to oldest, so every few pages now, I hit on something I already knew that still hurts anyway.

October, September, August, we get a repeat offender:

MARRIOTT BKLYN BRIDGE NY

I keep going. July, June, May, nada.

April, and a Marriott charge on the 11th.

February 7th comes up and I take it on the chin like someone just slugged me in a boxing match.

“Oof,” I say out loud, like that’ll lessen the blow.

I was crying over a grave that day.

A few hours later, my sister was fucking my husband, and then they were hand-feeding each other steak-frites and ice cream.

But that’s surely gonna be the worst of it. It’s just getting poked in a wound that still hasn’t healed. Now that I’m through that, everything else will be fine.

… Right?

I make it through the first year and a half in a couple of hours, pausing only for interruptions whenever customers ring the bell by the register.

Fifty-three bucks for the girl who wanted a smash cake with a dinosaur on it, a tray of lemon squares for a wake, a woman who spent an eternity debating the merits of poppy seed versus everything bagels.

Then I open the second box and start on the older years.

Then something happens that I don’t understand.

On a statement from more than two years back—I have to check the header several times to make sure I’ve got the right one—there it is again.

MARRIOTT BKLYN BRIDGE NY

Three hundred and eighty-one dollars.

I put down the highlighter.

The text thread I found on the iPad starts then. I guess I kinda just forgot that the affair could have predated the messages?

Or maybe I just fooled myself into believing it. A method of mental damage control.

I’ve been walking around for almost a week with a number in my head. Just over a year. Fourteen months. Four hundred and something days. If I was good at math, I’d figure out how many hours.

Don’t get me wrong: Fourteen months is still bad. Frankly, it’s a horror show.

But it’s something I can wrap my head around.

This…

This, I’m not so sure I can.

I look at the date on the statement. Twenty-six months.

Could that possibly be true?

I open the bottom drawer of my desk.