Page 150 at Midnight

Daniel left just after dusk, the way he always did before a long haul. He kissed the top of my head, slung his weekend bag over his shoulder, and told me not to wait up. The client was three hundred miles away, the meeting was at eight the next morning, and the only way to make it was to drive through the night. He hated those drives. He'd complained about them for years — the truck stops that smelled of burnt coffee, the white lines hypnotizing him, the way his back seized up by hour four.

I believed him. Why wouldn't I? After eleven years of marriage, you stop auditing the small things. You hand over trust the way you hand over the remote.

I made myself a cup of chamomile and settled into the corner of the couch with my reader, which is where I live most evenings. Daniel teased me about it constantly. He said I read more than I breathed. He wasn't wrong. Books were the one thing I never outgrew, and over the years they'd become a private little world he liked to poke fun at but never really entered.

Around ten, my phone buzzed against the cushion. A text from him: "Halfway. Stopping for gas. Roads are dead. Miss you." I smiled, sent back a sleepy heart, and went back to my chapter. Three hours of driving. He'd be exhausted by the time he checked in.

At a quarter past midnight, a different kind of notification slid across my screen. Not a text. It was the little app I used to track what I read, the one that logged every book I started, every page I turned. A few months earlier I'd talked Daniel into making an account so we could compare lists. He'd shrugged and let me set it up for him, then never used it. I'd honestly forgotten he was even on there.

The notification read: "Daniel updated his progress. Now on page 150 of The Hollow Hour."

I stared at it. The Hollow Hour was a thriller I'd mentioned wanting to read. I hadn't bought it. He had, apparently, and he was a hundred and fifty pages deep. At twelve-fifteen in the morning. While supposedly piloting a car down a black interstate at seventy miles an hour.

The cup went cold in my hand.

I told myself there was an explanation. Maybe the app glitched. Maybe he'd updated it earlier and it was only syncing now. But I knew how the app worked, because I used it every single day. It logged the moment you tapped. He had been actively turning pages, marking his place, *reading*, at the exact minute he claimed to be white-knuckling the wheel through nowhere.

People who aren't readers don't understand how loud a small thing like that can be. He could fake a text. He could fake a tired voice on the phone. He could not fake the timestamp on a page he was turning in a warm bed somewhere with a lamp on and his shoes off.

I didn't call him. I sat very still and let the math finish itself. A man comfortable enough to sink into a hundred and fifty pages of a novel was not a man enduring anything. He was relaxed. He was settled. He was somewhere he wanted to be, with nowhere he needed to rush, and he had built an entire alibi around being miserable and alone on a road he wasn't on.

I checked the hotel charge on our shared card the next morning. Booked two nights, not one. Check-in had been at six the previous evening, barely an hour after he'd kissed my head and told me not to wait up. He'd never gotten on the highway at all. He'd driven twenty minutes across town.

When I confronted him, he led with the same exhausted-husband performance he'd been running for who knows how long — the sigh, the rubbed eyes, the "you're being paranoid." So I read his own activity log back to him. Page one fifty. Twelve-fifteen. He went quiet in a way I'd never heard from him, and in that silence I finally understood that the lie wasn't a single night. It was a routine. The drives. The early check-ins. The complaining that kept me from ever asking to come along.

He thought he'd married a woman lost in her books. He never once considered that the books would be the thing that found him.