HR called Neil on a Friday. I know the exact time because I was sitting in my car in the dental office parking lot when my phone rang and it was a Columbus number I didn’t recognize, and I almost didn’t answer it.

It was him.
I’m gonna get to that call. But first you need to understand what a Wednesday lunch break looks like when your coworker Diane goes “wait, is that your husband?”
I had been at Columbus Family Dental for six years at that point. I’m the office manager. Diane is the billing coordinator. We eat lunch together in the break room maybe three times a week, and she’s the kind of person who sends memes at 11:30 AM on a Tuesday that land exactly right. That Wednesday she was showing me one on her phone — something about a golden retriever — and she scrolled a little too far and stopped.

“Bev.”

She said my name the way people say it when they need you to look at something and they are not sure how bad it’s going to be.

I looked.

It was Neil. On Tinder. Active within the last hour. Forty-seven photos.

I remember the sandwich I was eating. Turkey and mustard from the deli on Morse Road that I’ve been getting every Wednesday for three years. I put it down on the wax paper and I said something like “okay” and I went to the bathroom.

I stood at the sink with the water running for I don’t know how long. Five minutes. Maybe longer. I kept doing this thing where I almost cried and then didn’t. The fluorescent light in that bathroom has always been too bright and it felt very bright. The hand soap we order for the office smells like cucumber mint — I know that smell so well and I have kind of a complicated relationship with it now.

Anyway.

I went back out and told Diane I needed to get back to charting.

I did not tell Neil what I knew. I made pork chops for dinner. I watched an episode of something with him on the couch and I do not remember a single frame of it. I petted Potato. I went to bed when he did and I stared at the ceiling for what felt like most of the night.

There’s a whole thing that happened around this time with his sister Pamela that I’m not going to get into here — whole other situation and she knew more than she let on, I am fairly sure of that. But that’s a different story.

What I will tell you is that I got up the next morning and I made a profile.

It took me about forty-five minutes. I won’t go into detail about what “Lexi” looked like except to say that she looked plausible and she looked like someone very different from me and she looked exactly like the kind of profile Neil would swipe right on. I know this because I had just spent an afternoon examining 47 photos of my husband on a dating app and reading his bio. He’d described himself as “spontaneous.” He used the word “adventurous.” Neil’s idea of spontaneous is ordering the other thing at Chipotle.

Eleven minutes after I put Lexi live, he matched me.

I didn’t rush it. We talked casually for four days. He was good at it actually — funny, warm, asking the right questions. It made everything slightly worse to witness, you know what I mean? To watch someone perform being charming for someone who isn’t you. I kept the conversations going through work, through dinner, through Sunday afternoon while he was in the other room watching football.

God, I wanted to believe there was some other explanation. There wasn’t one. I tried to think of one the whole four days and I couldn’t find it.

On the fourth day I asked Lexi’s big question, the one I’d been working toward the whole time: “Are you actually single?”

And Neil — my husband, nine years, who I’d chosen and who’d said vows — typed back: “yeah I’m technically married but it’s pretty much over.”

I read that for a long time.

I’m not gonna tell you exactly what I felt when I read it because I’ve tried to describe it and I always get it wrong. I think I felt — cold? Or maybe blank. I was sitting on the bathroom floor with Potato trying to get into my lap and the heater was making that ticking sound it makes and I read it probably eight times.

“Technically married.”

I saved every screenshot. Sent copies to my email, my Google Drive, and I AirDropped them to my iPad. I’m not sure why I went that far with the backups. I think I just needed to do something with my hands.

Now. Neil’s boss, Gareth Mallory, is important here. I had met Gareth twice. Company Christmas party, 2022 — he shook my hand and introduced himself with his first and last name. Golf event the following spring that I attended for one hour before leaving because I do not golf and I was bored. What I know about Gareth Mallory: he drives a Lincoln Navigator, coaches Pop Warner football, has a framed photo with three different senators in his office according to Neil, and once sent a company-wide email about “professional standards” that was reportedly three pages long.

I composed the email to Gareth on a Thursday night. I sent it Friday at 8:47 AM.

It included six screenshots. The profile itself. The conversation. The “technically married” message, enlarged and highlighted. I wrote four sentences in the body of the email and I deleted forty-seven drafts before landing on those four sentences. I kept it factual. No editorializing. Just: here is what I found, here is who this is, here is what he told someone he believes is not his wife.

I don’t actually know what happened in that HR meeting. Neil never told me the details and I didn’t ask and he didn’t offer. What I know is that by Friday at 11 AM my phone rang with a Columbus number, and it was him, and his voice sounded like someone who had just had a very specific kind of day.

He asked me how I knew about Gareth’s email.

I said: “Neil, I AM Lexi.”

I wasn’t gonna tell you what he said next. I changed my mind. He said: “I think I need to sit down.”

He was, as far as I know, already sitting.

We’re not together anymore. The separation agreement took about four months and my lawyer said it was straightforward which I think is a polite word for “boring.” Some of his friends called me ruthless. A few of them called me worse. His mother didn’t speak to me for three months which honestly was fine, she never liked me.

I still work at Columbus Family Dental. I still get the turkey sandwich on Wednesdays. Diane puts a little star sticker on my lunch bag now every Wednesday. She started doing it after and never explained it and I never asked.

Potato is fine.