My legs went completely numb. I just stared at the screen, my brain refusing to process what my eyes were seeing. I did not scream. I did not cry. I just closed the laptop and put it under my side of the bed. I did not know what else to do.

For four weeks, I let him keep his routine. Every Tuesday and Thursday, he worked late. And every Tuesday and Thursday, I took the SD card out of his truck after he fell asleep and copied the files. It was always the exact same route.

He bought her groceries. I found the receipts in his console when I went to get the SD card. One hundred and eighty dollars on a single trip to Kroger. He bought her organic strawberries, bakery bread, and ribeye steaks. Things we had not eaten in years.

The contrast was humiliating. I was standing in line at the grocery store, counting pennies to make sure we could afford milk, while my husband of thirty-one years was buying prime beef for a stranger in a yellow sweater. The unfairness of it burned in my throat.

My sister Sarah lived three doors down from us. She was over at our house almost every day. She would sit at my kitchen table, drinking my coffee, watching me clip coupons. “You work too hard, Ellen,” she would say. “David is lucky to have you.” I actually told her about the grocery budget being tight.

She had nodded, sympathetic, and suggested we start buying dry beans in bulk. I trusted her with everything. We had shared secrets since we were girls sharing a bedroom in Ohio. She was my anchor. On Thursday night, I cooked his favorite pot roast. I set the table with the good yellow plates we only used on holidays.

I put the laptop right next to his water glass. When he sat down, he looked tired. He smelled like grease and peppermint gum. He reached for the potatoes. I did not say a word. I just opened the laptop and pressed the spacebar. The video started playing immediately.

It was the footage from two days prior, showing him carrying three Kroger bags up to her porch. His fork froze. He did not drop it. He just held it there, three inches above his plate, his eyes locked on the screen. The silence in the kitchen was heavy, broken only by the sound of the wind chimes outside.

“Thirty-one years, David,” I said. My voice was quiet. I did not want to scream. I wanted him to look at me, but he would not. He just kept staring at his own face on the laptop screen, walking up those wooden steps. “She was there when you weren’t,” he whispered.