If her trash had been picked up (Was she away? On business or pleasure?).

If her mail had been taken in (Had she returned?).

If her newspapers (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal) were still on the front steps ( Was she sleeping late? Alone? With someone?).

If she was engaging in any suspicious activity (walking, talking, breathing).

I was developing, as FBI special crime units call it, a profile on Adrienne—tracking her movements, mapping out her daily routine and schedule, piecing together a composite of who she was from the collected puzzle pieces of what she did and where she went and whom she saw. For no apparent reason I was coming apart at the seams, and had I not been so skilled in the secret art of pathological jealousy (years of practice, from high school on, had perfected my techniques), had I not been so adept at engaging in the disorder’s aforementioned requisite clandestine activities and behaviors while keeping those clandestine activities and behaviors hidden from my beloved betrothed, Donald would have caught on to me and left me long before we’d made it to the altar.

Not to mention the fact that Adrienne herself could have caught on and reported my surveillance (stalking) to the police and had me legally restrained.

Either way, I was, inexplicably, well down the road to self-destruction. Along which I risked, at the very least, losing all of our pre-bridal deposits and, at the very most, I risked losing Donald: the one man whom I had ever truly loved and who had ever truly loved me.

Not exactly the normal way for a woman, affianced, only months away from her wedding day with the rest of her (presumably) happy life ahead of her, to behave.

Not normal at all.

5

My obsession with Adrienne started long before her phone call that night; long before I met her for the first time; long before she actually came to live in Washington and sucked all the joy out of my life with Donald. In fact, my obsession with Adrienne and attendant illicit snooping could be traced back to the first time I stayed over at Donald’s house; the first time I had, as law enforcement officers would say, access and opportunity.

Not to mention motive.

It happened like this:

Donald and I went to bed together; he fell asleep; and in my postcoital wakefulness, I realized I could, with any luck, make a quick sweep of his house and find a photo of this Adrienne without waking him.

I wish I could say that there was a reason such a thought occurred to me at that moment in time—that Donald had uttered Adrienne’s name during sex; that he had uttered her name in his sleep; that there was a near-life-size painted portrait of her, Rebecca-like, hanging above the fireplace—something, anything, to explain my sudden need to investigate.

But there was not.

I wish I could say that I not only considered the ethical and moral dilemma of snooping through the belongings of a man I respected and with whom I had just been so intimate (and who, for the record, had given me no reason thus far to doubt the veracity of his affections for me or to suspect the existence of affections for her), and that I struggled with that dilemma, trying to stop myself from doing what I knew was wrong.