She picked up on the third ring. I told her my name and that my wife worked with her husband and that I was sorry to call out of nowhere, but I had some information I thought she deserved to hear. There was a long pause. Then she asked, very carefully, "What kind of information?" I told her the short version. Her husband and my wife, a lake cabin 2 hours north, a standing arrangement that had been running for the better part of a year.
She said, "Okay." in a flat voice, and then asked me not to call back and hung up. I hadn't expected anything different. I emailed her the photos that night. Three of the best ones from the porch. Holly's face clear.
Brent's profile clear. The body language not remotely ambiguous. I wrote one sentence above them. I thought you should see these before you decided whether to call back. I didn't ask for anything.
She called me the next morning at 7:45. Her voice was different. Not soft, not broken. More like she'd spent the night moving from one phase to the next and had come out the other side of it into something harder. She asked how long I'd been watching.
I told her. She asked if I had more photos. I said, "Yes." She asked if I was planning to confront Holly. I said, "Not until I had everything I needed and that I thought she deserved to be part of that conversation." "What do you mean by everything?" she asked. I said I meant I wanted to actually catch them.
Not just have photos of a porch kiss. I wanted the kind of proof that removes all the wiggle room. She was quiet for a second. Then she said she wanted that, too. We talked for about 40 minutes.
By the end of it, she'd agreed to wait and not say anything to Brent. I asked her to trust me on the timing. She said she wasn't sure she trusted anyone right now, but that she'd wait because she didn't have a better option. I told her there was one more thing. I explained about Amber and about Rick and about what I thought Rick didn't know yet.
"So it's both of them." She said. I said, "Yeah, both of them." She said she'd met Amber maybe twice at work functions. She didn't sound surprised. She sounded like someone recalibrating something she'd already half suspected but hadn't had a name for. Rick called me the following evening, which told me Dana had reached out to him herself.
I hadn't asked her to do that. I'd been trying to figure out how to approach him, but I wasn't unhappy she had. His call was short. He said Dana had told him the situation, that there was a second person involved, that he and I were apparently in the same boat. His voice was level, quiet, the kind of quiet that's doing a lot of work underneath.