I walked into her house. It was a lovely, lived-in home. There were family photos on the hallway wall. Michael smiling at a beach. Michael holding a newborn baby. Michael at a backyard barbecue. The kids in the photos were about eight and six years old.

They were his kids. He had told me he never had children because his late wife’s illness had cut their time short.

Sarah made a pot of tea. Her hands were trembling so badly she spilled hot water on the counter. We sat at her oak kitchen table, and we both took off our rings. We placed them side by side on the wood. They were completely identical. Even the small engraving on the inside band, a tiny infinity symbol we had selected, was the same on both.

“He told me he was working overtime to pay for our son’s speech therapy,” Sarah said. She was staring at the rings, her eyes wide and dry with shock. “We’ve been married eleven years. He’s never missed a mortgage payment. I didn’t think anything was wrong.”

“He spent Tuesdays and Thursdays at my apartment,” I said, the numbers running through my head like cold math. “He told me those were his late warehouse nights. And the weekends he said he was working the night shift.”

We compared notes. The lies were seamless. He had used my $14,000 to pay off his own credit cards, cards he had run up buying expensive golf club memberships and taking his family on weekend trips to Hocking Hills while telling me he was visiting his elderly mother.

Then we heard the sound of his truck tires on the gravel driveway. The heavy thud of the cabin door closing.

Sarah and I didn’t say a word. We sat side by side at the kitchen table, the two identical Zales rings sitting directly in the center on the wood.

Michael walked in through the back door. He was carrying a grocery bag with a gallon of milk, whistling a soft tune. He stopped dead in his tracks. He looked at me. He looked at Sarah. Then his eyes drifted down to the table where the two rings lay.