“James Whitfield.” I said it out loud in our bedroom like saying it would make it mean something, but I just stood there holding this worn leather wallet I’d never seen before, reading a name that wasn’t my husband’s name, on a driver’s license that had his face on it.

I had been hanging up his jacket. That’s the whole mundane reason any of this happened.

He’d left it over the chair in the bedroom the way he always does, and I was tidying up because we had people coming over Saturday and I didn’t want the bedroom looking like a laundry pile. I felt something stiff in the inner lining when I picked it up. Not in the regular pocket. In the lining itself, like someone had cut a small slit and slipped something in there a long time ago. I almost ignored it. Part of me wishes I had.

I worked it out through the fabric first. Then I found the slit and pulled it out. It was a slim wallet, older than anything David currently carries, the leather kind of dried out and cracked at the fold. Inside there was the license. A VA hospital card with the same name on it. James Whitfield. And then the photo. A boy, maybe nine or ten years old, standing in front of what looked like a chain-link fence somewhere. Squinting into the sun. Smiling. I don’t know why but I kept looking at the photo the longest. There was something about the smile that I recognized and I couldn’t figure out why at first.

I set everything on the bed and sat next to it. I think I just waited. I don’t remember deciding to wait but I must have because I didn’t go find David, I didn’t call anyone. I just sat there with these three things laid out on the comforter like some kind of evidence. The license. The VA card. The boy.

David came out of the bathroom maybe ten minutes later, doing that thing where he’s rubbing the back of his neck with a towel after a shower. He saw me sitting there and then he saw what was on the bed and he stopped moving completely. Not dramatically. He just stopped. He looked at the things on the bed for a while and then he sat down. Not on the bed. On the floor. Which I thought was strange. He just sat down on the floor with his back against the dresser and put his hands on his knees.

He said, “I need to tell you something I was never supposed to tell anyone.”

I remember thinking that was such a specific sentence. Not “I can explain” or “it’s not what you think.” He already knew exactly what he was going to say. Which meant part of him had been preparing to say it for a long time.