The staff locker room at Ironside Strength smelled the way it always did after close: bleach, rubber, somebody's eucalyptus body wash, and underneath all of it the faint metal tang of the lockers themselves. Kristen Dahl had been in it a thousand times. She had sat on the long wooden bench and laced her shoes beside her husband before the five a.m. classes. She had once, in the second year of their marriage, kissed him against locker fourteen while the dryer in the laundry closet thumped like a heartbeat. It was not a room she expected to remember for the rest of her life.
"I'm going to grab the mop bucket," Brock said. "Can you find my keys? Side pocket, I think."
"You think," she said.
"I know. Probably. Side pocket." He was already walking toward the door to the main floor, broad in his dark grey tee, the back of his neck still damp from the last session. He had trained a retired fire captain at seven and a pair of high school wrestlers at eight, and he moved now with the loose, satisfied tiredness of a man who had spent his day helping other people lift heavy things.
Kristen crouched at the black duffel bag on the bench. Her ponytail swung forward over her shoulder, and she flicked it back. Her own workout had been short and furious, a thirty-minute row she'd done mostly to burn off a day of spreadsheets at the county assessor's office, and she was ready to go home, eat leftover chili, and fall asleep with her feet in his lap during whatever show he wanted.
The side pocket held a protein bar wrapper, two hair ties that were hers, and a receipt from the hardware store. No keys. She unzipped the main compartment. Black shorts, a wadded shirt, a rolled grey towel. She lifted the towel to look under it, because of course the keys would be at the very bottom, and something slid out of the roll and landed against her knuckles.
A phone. Black, plain, in a cheap rubber case.
Her first thought was simple and stupid: he bought a new phone and didn't tell me. Her second thought arrived a half-second later, because Brock's phone, the one with the cracked corner and the picture of their old dog on the lock screen, was in his back pocket. She had watched him check it at the front desk ten minutes ago.
She pressed the side button. The screen woke without a passcode, already open, as if someone had been using it and set it down in a hurry. It showed a short list of contacts, and at the top, beside a circular photo of a smiling woman with silver-blonde hair and laugh lines, a single letter: J.
There were only four contacts. J. Something called CH Intake. A local number with no name. And one labeled S.
Kristen stared at the S for a long time, though it was probably only two seconds.
"Why do you have another phone?" she said. She said it over her shoulder, sharp, without turning all the way around, because some part of her wanted to keep her body between the phone and the door.
His footsteps stopped. She heard him take a breath, and then she heard him decide to make it sound like nothing.