The Quiet Room
The Sound of the Buckle

3. What He Admitted

August 25, 2026 · Part 3 of 10 · 2 min

"Who were you talking to?" Rosalind asked that night, after Junie was down, after the dishes were dried and put away like the evening was ordinary.

Gareth didn't look up from his laptop. "Work stuff."

"You said 'the house.' You said 'what am I supposed to tell her.' Gareth. Look at me."

He did, finally, and something in his face rearranged itself into careful patience — the look of a man choosing his words like they were stepping stones over water. "Fine. It was Em. He's freaking out because he heard the agency's asking about his placement history. He's scared he's going to lose his license over nothing."

"Junie was placed with him. Before us. Did you know that?"

"Not until after. I swear." He held her gaze steady. "I went by his place a couple times while she was there — dropped off groceries, that's it. He was going through the divorce, Ros, he needed help. I didn't even really see her. I didn't know who she was until the agency called us months later."

A couple times. It sounded reasonable. It sounded like the version of her husband she'd married — steady, dutiful, the guy who showed up for family.

She wanted, badly, to let it end there.

But that night, lying awake while Gareth slept beside her like nothing in the world was wrong, she found herself reaching for her tablet instead. Their family plan synced everyone's call logs to one cloud account — a convenience Gareth had set up himself, back when trust was just a fact of the marriage and not a question she'd have to test.

She typed Emmett's name into the search bar.

The log didn't load a couple of calls.

It loaded forty-one.

Spanning exactly the eleven weeks Junie had lived in that house — nightly, some past midnight, one at 2:47 a.m. — and Rosalind sat in the blue glow of the screen with her stomach turning to ice, scrolling and scrolling and finding no bottom to it at all.

Continue the story Part 4: 4. The Calls →

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