I took the notebook into the kitchen and compared the handwriting with his job sheets. The letters weren’t even close. I asked him who had been writing in it, and he immediately asked where I’d found it. That was the answer before he ever gave one. He finally admitted his brother Jesse had been keeping track of my schedule for months because he believed I was “hiding something.” But when I asked why Jesse cared where I went, my husband went quiet. Then he opened the toolbox and pulled out another notebook.
The second notebook wasn’t about me. It was about my husband. Every entry listed where he had gone, who he’d met, and how long he’d been gone. The dates matched the days he’d told me he was working late. Then I noticed something strange: several entries had been crossed out and rewritten in a different hand. I called Jesse myself. He didn’t deny keeping the notebooks. He said he’d started because my husband had asked him to. “He wanted proof,” Jesse told me. “But after a while, I realized you weren’t the person we needed to watch.” I asked him what he meant. He said, “Look at the dates in April.”
I went back through the pages. Every day I was supposedly three hours away, my husband had written that he saw me near our house. But I had been in Toledo the entire time. Then Jesse told me the notebook wasn’t meant to catch me cheating. My husband had been convinced someone was using my car while I was away. He’d noticed the mileage changing and had started documenting it. The reason the handwriting wasn’t his was because Jesse had taken over after discovering that someone was making duplicate keys to my car. That evening we checked the vehicle together. Hidden beneath the driver’s seat was a second key — freshly cut, with no label. And written on the final page of the notebook were four words: “He knows we’re watching now.”
