Chapter 7 - The Notebook
By the time we got home, twelve relatives had replied to Mom's message. Aunt Linda offered prayers. My cousin said I needed to "get control of my house." Nobody asked what Emily's scalp looked like.
I sent one response: I witnessed Mom pull Emily by the hair. Emily did not attack her. Please stop spreading this.
Linda called immediately. "Your mother says you grabbed her."
"I grabbed her wrist to make her let go of my wife."
"You know she's emotional."
"That doesn't give her permission to hurt somebody."
Linda sighed as if I were making Thanksgiving seating difficult. "Families forgive, Daniel."
"Forgiveness isn't a house key."
At nine, the locksmith replaced both deadbolts and the side-door lock. He handed me six new keys. I gave Emily one and told him not to make copies for anyone else. When he left, Emily went upstairs to pack the rest of her clothes. I was wiping the soup stain from the floor when she called my name. Not loudly. Somehow that was worse.
She stood beside our bed, pointing at the empty space in her nightstand drawer.
"My notebook is gone."
It was a green spiral notebook. I'd seen her write in it for months without asking what she was putting down. She told me it contained dates, quotations, things Mom had done, and the excuses I'd given afterward. It was how she checked her own memory when I made her doubt it.
I opened the camera app. At 8:06 that morning, while we were at urgent care, Mom's car had pulled into the driveway. The front camera showed her walking toward the side gate. The side camera, partly blocked by a hanging fern, captured her leaving seven minutes later with something flat under her jacket.
"She came into our bedroom," Emily said. Her voice cracked on the word our.
I called the police nonemergency line to report the entry and the missing notebook. Then I saved the footage in three places. Emily called Jess and asked whether she could come that afternoon.
I started to say she didn't have to leave now that we'd changed the locks. I stopped before the sentence was finished.
"I know," Emily said quietly. "You're learning. But I still need to go."
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A text from Mom arrived while she was carrying her suitcase downstairs. It contained a photograph of an open notebook page.
Below it she'd written: Let's see how innocent your wife looks when everyone reads this.
