Jess used to run the numbers. For six years she sat in the back office of the restaurant she built with her husband, Jon, and knew every figure before anyone else did. Now she keeps a different ledger: ounces of formula on a pad stuck to the refrigerator, minutes of crying, the hours between last ticket and the rattle of his truck in the driveway.
Lately, the numbers don't balance.
A call declined with two fingers and turned face-down on the counter. A name she first saw on a payroll sheet, ringing through the car speakers at 6:40 in the morning. A new menu with somebody else's ideas in it. An awards banquet three hours south, and an invitation she turns down before he finishes offering it.
She has no proof. She has a hallway mirror, a pause before "makes sense," and a husband who comes home every night and holds on longer than he needs to.
She could ask. She could pick up the phone on the nightstand, eighteen inches from her hand. Or she could do the hardest thing she has ever done in that bed: wait.
Book Two of The Echo Chamber tells the same months from the other side of the marriage. Jonathon's story belonged to him. This one belongs to the wife who saw more than he knew.