That was the creative part. I had known for over a week because Tyler Lawson had a cousin, a woman named Dana Griffith, who I knew professionally through a county health advisory board. Dana had mentioned it, not knowing that her cousin's name meant anything to me. She'd mentioned it the way people mention things that are already public knowledge in a family.
"My cousin Tyler is dealing with some health stuff. Turns out he has hep C. He's starting treatment." I filed it away. Quietly.
The way epidemiologists file things. And when Rebecca walked back into the house from the deck that night, her face pale and her hands trembling slightly, and she sat down across from me at the kitchen table, I didn't say another word. I let the silence do the work. She cracked in about four minutes.
It started slowly, the way confessions usually do, with the perimeter of the truth rather than the center of it. She said she hadn't meant for it to happen. She said it had been building for months, that Tyler understood her in ways she felt I'd stopped trying to. She said she knew it was wrong.
She said she'd told herself it was just the conference, just one week, a way to get it out of her system and move on. Then she said, "But it wasn't just the conference." She said it started before Austin. Four months before Austin.
And the Austin trip hadn't been primarily a conference. The conference existed. She had attended the first two days, but the remaining 12 days, Tyler had rented an Airbnb outside the city, near Lake Austin. One of those modern properties on the water that rents for $5,000 a week.
They had spent almost two weeks in that house together, while I was at work in San Diego tracking disease data and calling her every other evening to ask how her conference was going. When she finished talking, she was crying. Full, genuine tears. She said she was sorry.
She said she wanted to fix things. She said she'd never intended to hurt me. I looked at her across the kitchen table. This woman I had chosen.
This woman I had built a life with. This woman who had just spent 14 days in a lakeside house with another man and come home and hugged me like nothing had happened. And I felt something settle into place inside me. Not rage.
Something colder than rage. Clarity. I said, "I'm going to need you to get tested tomorrow. Not just for hepatitis C, a full panel."
She nodded. I said, "And then I need you to leave the house for a few days. Stay with your sister. Don't contact me until I reach out first."