“So you decided to be her husband on Sundays?” I asked.

“It wasn’t like that,” he said. “We didn’t… it wasn’t physical, Brenda. I swear to you. We just went to church. We had breakfast. I helped her with her lawn.”

“You gave her my mother’s window,” I said.

He didn’t have an answer for that. He just stared at his hands.

That was three months ago.

The legal process has been slow and cold. My lawyer is a sharp woman named Sarah who doesn’t care about “Christian charity” when it comes to marital assets.

We hired a forensic accountant. They found that Mark had opened a separate account using his county credit union access. He’d been funneling money there for almost a decade.

He has to pay it back. All of it. The court is forcing the sale of his share of our house to cover the missing funds.

The church, St. Luke’s, had to do an internal audit because my lawyer threatened a formal deposition of their treasurer. They returned twenty thousand dollars of the “disputed tithing” just to avoid the local news finding out about the “married” donors who weren’t actually married.

I should have felt some massive wave of victory when the papers were finally signed last Tuesday.

I keep waiting to feel something huge. Some dramatic release.

But mostly, I just drove home. I made some pasta for my daughter, who drove down from Columbus to help me pack up Mark’s remaining boxes.

She asked me if I was okay.

“I’m fine,” I told her.

And I am. But it is just a Tuesday.

My Buick still has that clicking sound in the engine. I still have to call the plumber about the leak in the upstairs tub.

You win, and then you just have to figure out what to make for dinner. That is the part nobody warns you about.

But I kept the blue dress. It is hanging in the front of my closet now. It looks very nice.