Her email was open, but it wasn’t her school account. Instead it was a Hotmail account he knew nothing about, and her user name was Jane309, using her middle name and her birthday. Why did she have a second email account?
He glanced at the Sent folder, seeing only two names: her sister April out in California and an unfamiliar one: [email protected]. There were about eight messages to that address, including her most recently sent one. Nick clicked it open:
“J:
“ohmygod your message made my nipples stand up! I can’t risk Sunday—no telling what Nick might be doing. Let’s meet there Monday at 11. I can’t wait!
“xxoo E”
Nick sat back in shock, staring at the screen. What the fuck?
**********************
His lunch forgotten, Nick grimly settled down to dig through Emily’s email and do some digging on the Web. It took an hour before he had the full picture.
Jason Pritzker was an educational consultant who had spent two weeks at Emily’s school in early May, leading professional development workshops with the teachers. The picture on his web page showed a good-looking guy who appeared to be in his late thirties, a couple of years older than Nick and Emily. He was married with several kids and lived over in Jefferson Meadows, past the airport to the east of Columbus, about 25 miles from Nick and Emily’s house in Grove City.
From what Nick could tell, Pritzker had set his sights on Emily during the workshops and pursued her since. Their exchanged messages had begun cautiously, but then become increasingly open and passionate. Pritzker wrote two weeks earlier that “kissing you was the most erotic experience of my entire life—I carry around on my lips the indelible memory of you.”
They’d met alone at least three times—and it was clear that while Pritzker hadn’t fucked her yet, he was getting close. His most recent message to Emily had read
“My beautiful E:
“I have never seen, or touched, such gorgeous breasts in my life. You are a goddess!
“We need more time—I ache, I burn to BE with you, completely, at last. Can you get away Sunday, to the usual place?
“Your J”
The only person that Emily had apparently confided in about her affair, not surprisingly, was her big sister April. Also not surprisingly, April was horrified and kept trying to talk her out of it. A week earlier she’d written
“Are you out of your mind? Remember what happened to my friend Monica? How her husband found out and threw her out of the house? Did you know she’s living in a tiny apartment and only gets to see her kids twice a week? Is fucking some handsome stranger a few times going to be worth it if Nick finds out?”
There were three or four other messages like that from April, all along the same lines. In one she wrote
“Nick LOVES you, Em—and he makes a good living and is a fantastic father to Charlie and Ben. You told me yourself that you couldn’t imagine being married to a better man, and that you love him now even more than you did when you guys got married. So WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?”
It seemed that Emily didn’t have very good answers to that question—though Nick was hardly an unbiased judge. In one of her first messages to April about Pritzker she wrote that