PART 3
Rosalind didn’t confront Bernard further that afternoon. Instead, she did something that surprised even herself: she left the apartment exactly as she’d found it, drove home in silence, and spent the evening quietly documenting everything she could recall about the past fourteen months—unexplained late nights, a sudden increase in his gym attendance that had never once resulted in any visible fitness change, a credit card statement he’d started keeping in a separate drawer six months earlier that she’d never thought to question.
The following morning, she called Gavin.
“Mom, is everything okay? You sound strange.”
“I need you to come over after work today. Alone, if possible. There’s something about your father I need to tell you, and I think it’s better you hear it from me before he has a chance to construct his own version.”
Gavin arrived that evening, visibly anxious, and Rosalind told him everything—the duplicate key she’d had made months earlier out of her own misplaced suspicion of Willa, the discovery in his apartment, Bernard’s admission about how long the affair with Piper had actually been going on.
Gavin’s reaction moved through disbelief, anger, and finally a kind of stunned, quiet betrayal that mirrored, in its own way, exactly what Rosalind herself had felt standing in that bedroom doorway.
“He’s been using my apartment,” Gavin said slowly. “For over a year. I gave him that key because I felt bad about him driving home so late after visiting me at the office sometimes. I thought I was helping him.”
“You were. He simply chose to use that help for something else entirely.”
“Does Willa know?”
“No. And I owe her an apology too, honestly. I was so convinced she was the one betraying this family that I broke into your apartment expecting to catch her, not your father.”
Gavin was quiet for a long moment. “You had a key made to my apartment because you suspected Willa of cheating?”
“I did. It was wrong of me, Gavin. I see that clearly now, though I imagine it’s a smaller wrong compared to everything else that came out of that same afternoon.”
