She had fabricated the entire story. She even manufactured a fake hotel booking using a joint account we shared for our mother’s medical expenses. She told David I was meeting an old high school boyfriend.

And David, looking for an excuse to stray, had believed her without asking me.

The woman in the yellow sweater at the lake house was a coworker of his. They had been together for over a year, all based on a lie my own sister had planted in his head. A lie he used to justify destroying our wedding vows.

“I didn’t think you’d ever find out,” Sarah whispered through the speaker. “David was miserable anyway. I thought it would just happen naturally.” I did not answer her. I hung up the phone and set it on the table. The pot roast was cold now.

The grease was starting to separate on the yellow plate. David was crying. He reached across the table to touch my hand, but I pulled it back. He looked like an old man, small and foolish, ruined by his own gullibility and greed. “Ellen, please,” he sobbed.

“I was stupid. I was so angry because I thought you had betrayed me first. She made it look so real. Please, Ellen, thirty-one years.” I stood up and picked up the seventy-nine dollar dashcam from the table. I walked to the front door, opened it, and threw it into the gravel driveway.

It shattered into cheap plastic pieces. The divorce took four months. I got the house. He had to sell his truck to pay for his half of the legal fees. He moved into a cheap apartment near the mill. The woman at the lake house left him three weeks after the video leaked to his coworkers.

I do not speak to Sarah anymore. She moved to Florida last month. My aunt told me she is living in a trailer park near Ocala. I did not ask for her address. Sometimes I look out the window at the empty space three doors down where her car used to sit.

I still do not know how to feel. I won the house, I got my freedom, but the kitchen always feels too big on Thursday nights. David called me last week from a payphone. He wanted to know if I still had the yellow plates.

I told him I threw them out. He stayed on the line for a second, breathing quietly, before he delivered the line I still can’t get out of my head. “You bought a seventy-nine dollar camera to catch me,” he whispered, “but we both ended up paying everything we had.”