“What?” she whispered.

Before I could answer, a little girl appeared from behind the kitchen counter. She was about seven years old. She had Mark’s nose and his exact brown eyes. She was holding a drawing of a horse.

She looked up at me, her eyes wide with curiosity. “Are you Daddy’s other mommy?” she asked. “He said you live far away and you’re very sick.”

Clara, the woman, let out a sharp, choked sound. She set the toddler down on the floor. He immediately crawled toward a basket of blocks. Clara’s hands were shaking so violently she had to hold onto the back of a kitchen chair to steady herself.

“Please,” Clara said. Her voice was cracking. “Please tell me this is a joke.”

I pulled out my phone. I didn’t say anything. I opened my photo app and scrolled back to our anniversary trip to Hocking Hills the previous summer. I showed her the picture of Mark and me standing in front of the waterfall. He had his arm around my waist. He was wearing the blue flannel shirt I bought him for Christmas.

Clara stared at the screen. She didn’t cry. She just stood there, her mouth slightly open.

“We’ve been married fifteen years,” I said. My voice was surprisingly steady. The panic had gone, replaced by a strange, cold numbness.

“He… we’ve been together eight years,” Clara whispered. She looked at the little girl, Maya, who was still standing there holding her drawing. “Maya, go to your room baby. Go play with your tablets.”

The little girl looked confused, but she saw her mother’s face and ran down the hall without a word.

Clara sat down at the kitchen table. It was a wooden table, covered in sticky spots from juice and crayon marks. I sat down opposite her.

For the next three hours, we sat in that kitchen and took apart the last eight years of our lives.

We discovered that Mark was a monster of efficiency. He had met Clara at a diner near his work. He told her he was a divorced surveyor who had to travel constantly for his state contracts. He told her his “sister” Sarah had suffered a severe nervous breakdown after her husband died and lived in their family home in Parma, and that he had to stay there during the week to manage her care and keep her stable.