Free The Woman Next Door by Barbara Delinsky Page A

scrubbed a pan. “I don’t watch. I don’t see cars out there. Really I don’t, Karen. I have better things to do with my time. Besides, it didn’t have to happen here. She goes out.”
    “Not for long.”
    “It doesn’t take long.”
    Karen wasn’t buying it. “Graham was working with her all fall. He was in her house a lot.”
    “Graham loves Amanda. You’re barking up the wrong tree.”
    “But they’re having trouble. You know, the infertility stuff. Things are tense.”
    “Not that tense.”
    “Then Lee,” Karen said with her heart in her throat. When Russ shot her a fast look, she lowered her voice. “You know about that little dental hygienist he was playing with last year, and you know that I know about her. His latest playmate could be Gretchen.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “But you don’t know for sure.”
    “I haven’t asked him, if that’s what you mean.” He unstoppered the sink. Soapy water swirled away. “Last I heard, the hygienist was ancient history. He swore he was a reformed man.” He ran water to rinse. “Besides, he wouldn’t fool around with the woman next door, not right under our eyes.”
    “Why not? His hygienist worked on my teeth, too.”
    “You know what I mean, Karen.”
    “Then if it isn’t one of you three guys, who is it?”
    “Beats me.”
    “You have to have some idea,” Karen pleaded. She wanted to know that it wasn’t Lee. She didn’t really care who it was, as long as it wasn’t her husband.
    Russ looked at her then. “Did you ask her directly?”
    “I couldn’t. She wasn’t very friendly. I brought her cookies. She didn’t even thank me.”
    “She was probably shocked that you’d visit at all. You ladies haven’t been very friendly toward her.”
    “We’ve been fine.”
    “Fine isn’t friendly.”
    “Gretchen isn’t June.”
    “So you all keep reminding her.”
    “We’ve never said that.”
    “Not in words.”
    Karen pinched the bridge of her nose. It wasn’t just thatGretchen wasn’t June. It was that she was thirty-two to Karen’s forty-three, and beautiful to Karen’s mousy. Gretchen was the kind of woman that men went for, especially men in their upper forties who didn’t want to be in their upper forties. Lee was forty-seven. And he had a history of fooling around.
    Suddenly weary, she let her hand drop. “Well. No use standing here. You won’t tell.”
    “I don’t know” Russ insisted.
    Karen didn’t believe him for a minute, but she knew better than to try to milk a stone. She had dinner in the oven. It would be done soon, and the kids would be hungry. Lee might even be home in time to join them.
    Walking back to her own house, she half hoped that he would phone with another of the lame excuses he used—that he was waiting for a call, or was needed in a meeting, or obligated to take his A-team of programmers to dinner because they had just met deadline on a job. Let him give her a line. She welcomed an opportunity to confront him.
    Lee was a computer genius. At least, Karen assumed he was a genius, since his company was doing well, but whether the success was due to his own brains or the brains of the people he hired, she didn’t know. She wasn’t into computers, and he discouraged her from using them. He said that if she got involved, they would become a boring couple. He said that he lived and breathed computers at work and didn’t want to talk business at home.
    In her most suspicious moments, she wondered if he was hiding something, wondered what she would find if she could turn on the computer in his den and read his e-mail. In her most guilty moments, though, she hated herself for thinking that way. He was her husband. They had been married for seventeen years. When shehad confronted him about the hygienist and threatened to leave, he had broken down in tears and sworn that it was over, that he loved her, Karen, and that he would be faithful.
    But the hygienist wasn’t the first. He had sworn that