Free The Stranger by Harlan Coben

the adults. She laid out the food on the kitchen island. Everyone grabbed plates and served themselves.
    It was a strikingly ordinary albeit cherished family dinner, and yet it felt to Adam as though there were a ticking bomb under their table. It was only a matter of time now. The dinner would end and the boys would do their homework or watch TV or mess around on the computer or play a video game. Would he wait until Thomas and Ryan went to bed? Probably. Except that over the past year or two, he or Corinne would fall asleep before Thomas. So he’d have to get Thomas in his room with the door closed before he could confront his wife with what he had learned.
    Tick, tick, tick . . .
    For most of the meal, Thomas held court. Ryan listened raptly. Corinne told a story about how one of the teachers got drunk in Atlantic City and threw up in the casino. The boys loved it.
    â€œDid you win any money?” Thomas asked.
    â€œI never gamble,” Corinne said, ever the mom, “and you shouldn’t either.”
    Both boys rolled their eyes.
    â€œI’m serious. It’s a terrible vice.”
    Now both boys shook their heads.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou’re so lame sometimes,” Thomas said.
    â€œI am not.”
    â€œAlways with the life-lesson stuff,” Ryan added with a laugh. “Cut it out.”
    Corinne looked to Adam for help. “Do you hear your sons?”
    Adam just shrugged. The subject changed. Adam didn’t remember to what. He was having trouble focusing. It was as though he were watching a movie montage of his own life—the happy family he and Corinne had created, having dinner, enjoying one another’scompany. He could almost see the camera slowly circling the table, getting everyone’s face, getting everyone’s back. It was so everyday, so hackneyed, so perfect.
    Tick, tick, tick . . .
    A half hour later, the kitchen was cleaned. The boys headed upstairs. As soon as they were out of sight, Corinne’s smile dropped off her face. She turned to Adam.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?”
    Amazing when he thought about it. He had lived with Corinne for eighteen years. He had seen her in every kind of mood, had experienced her every emotion. He knew when to approach, when to stay away, when she needed a hug, when she needed a kind word. He knew her well enough to finish her sentences and even her thoughts. He knew everything about her.
    There had been, he thought, no surprises. He even knew her well enough to know that what the stranger had alleged was indeed possible.
    Yet he hadn’t seen this. He hadn’t realized that Corinne could read him too, that she had known, despite his best effort to hide it, that something serious had upset him, that it wasn’t just a normal thing, that it was something big and maybe life-altering.
    Corinne stood there and waited for the blow. So he delivered it.
    â€œDid you fake your pregnancy?”

Chapter 8
    T he stranger sat at a corner table at the Red Lobster in Beachwood, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland.
    He nursed his Red Lobster “specialty cocktail,” a mango mai tai. His garlic shrimp scampi had started to congeal into something resembling tile caulk. The waiter had tried to take it from him twice, but the stranger had shooed him away. Ingrid sat across the table. She sighed and checked her watch.
    â€œThis has to be the longest lunch ever.”
    The stranger nodded. “Almost two hours.”
    They were watching a table with four women who were on their third “specialty cocktail” round and it wasn’t yet two thirty. Two of them had done Crabfest, the variety dish served on a plate the approximate circumference of a manhole cover. The third womanhad ordered the shrimp linguini Alfredo. The cream sauce kept getting caught up in the corners of her pink-lipsticked mouth.
    The fourth woman, whose name they knew was Heidi Dann, was the reason they were there. Heidi had