The Blue Hour by Douglas Kennedy Page A

approve—the banker, not the French part. But I am getting ahead of myself here, aren’t I?”
    Then, telling me she’d see me Monday at five o’clock, she headed off for her weekend and her meeting with the Frenchman who might, or might not, become a conduit into a new life.
    When Soraya was gone, I took a long shower and changed into fresh clothes, then checked my watch and thought that, if I moved quickly, I could still join Paul for a late lunch at Chez Fouad. But as Friday was the one day of the week I read my email, I decided to quickly scan this week’s dispatches before heading out to the souk.
    The first email I saw had been dispatched just twenty minutes earlier from the ever-scrupulous Morton. It read:
    Now that we have your husband’s audit problems with the IRS out of the way I’ve been doing his books in an attempt to bring them up to date so we are not in a bind at tax time next year. You know how he throws all his receipts and invoices and credit card statements into that file box you gave him. Well I started working through it on Wednesday and came across this invoice this morning. I debated about whether I should send it to you now or wait until you got back in a few weeks. But I decided that—as this was something of an ethical/moral call—I should err on the side of immediate transparency .
    I clicked on the attached file. I found myself staring at an invoice from a Dr. Brian Boyards, MD, Urologist. The invoice was for a patient named Leuen, Paul Edward. His date of birth—04-11-56—was the same as my husband’s. So too was the home address. And the Blue Cross/Blue Shield health insurance policy that he used to defray 80 percent of the $2,031.78 charges for the procedure listed on the invoice.
    Outpatient Non-Scalpel Deferentectomy .
    What is a deferentectomy?
    I switched over to Google and typed in that exact word.
    And discovered that a deferentectomy is the clinical term for a very common bit of urological surgery . . . also known as a vasectomy.
    And the date on which this Outpatient Non-Scalpel Deferentectomy was performed on my husband? September 7, 2014. Around the same time that we both agreed it was time to start trying for a child.

NINE

    I SAT IN front of my computer screen, trying to convince myself that what I just read was somehow false. A fabrication, an invention dispatched by a malevolent individual who wanted to see my marriage thrown completely off-course.
    The problem with hard-and-fast evidence—and an invoice from a doctor in the wake of a surgical procedure is about as irrefutable as it comes—is that you can’t negotiate with its black-and-white verities. It’s a bit like a client of mine who had run up around $10K in internet porn charges on his MasterCard one year. All the charges were assigned to Fantasy Promotions Inc. The time code for each of the transactions showed they were all late in the evening. His wife had seen the MasterCard statements and was just a little appalled. My client entreated me to provide him an alibi for these purchases. As I told him at the time, “How do you explain over one hundred and fifty dealings after midnight with an online company called Fantasy Promotions Inc.? There’s no wiggle room here. It’s the smoking gun.”
    Strange how that client—who was divorced with extreme prejudice by his wife thereafter—popped into my head as I found myself staring at that document from Dr. Brian Boyards, MD, Urologist. All the facts in front of me. Facts which I must have reread a dozen times, trying to find a way of reinterpreting the irrefutable:
    Patient: Leuen, Paul Edward
    Date of birth—04-11-56
    Home Address: 5165 Albany Avenue, Buffalo, NY 10699
    Insurance: Blue Cross/Blue Shield A566902566
    Procedure: Outpatient Non-Scalpel Deferentectomy
    Date of Procedure: 09-07-14
    The seventh of September last year. Around ten months ago. A few days after Labor