I want to be honest about something. I knew I should have gone back inside. He was hurt and asleep and full of painkillers and I was his wife and that was the moment a normal person stays.

But I couldn’t make myself walk back into that room and hold the hand of a man with two names. I put the Delaware address in my phone. Three hours, basically. And I drove. I don’t remember most of the drive. I remember stopping for gas and not buying anything and standing at the pump way too long. Actually I think I bought a water and then left it on the roof of the car and drove off. I don’t know. My head wasn’t right.

The house was a blue Cape Cod with white shutters. Nice. Nicer than ours, honestly, and that thought made me feel sick in a way I can’t explain, like I was being petty in the middle of the worst thing that ever happened to me. Later I looked it up. Two hundred eighty thousand dollars. I sat across the street for a while, long enough that I worried someone would call the police about the woman parked in front of their house. Then I walked up and knocked before I could talk myself out of it.

She was pretty. Soft looking, a little older than me maybe, with reading glasses pushed up in her hair. And that is when she said the thing about Paul being stuck at work. She held the door open. She thought I was somebody safe. I looked down at her hand on the door and there was a ring on it. I didn’t say anything for a second, I just kept looking at the ring, and I think she noticed me looking because she sort of laughed and said are you okay, honey.

“His name is David,” I said. “He’s in the hospital right now. I’m his wife.”

I’d love to tell you I had something better than that. Some perfect line. I didn’t. I just said the plainest true thing I had. And her face did this thing where it kind of came apart, slow, like she was solving a math problem she already knew the answer to and hated. She looked at my left hand. I looked at hers again. Same ring. Not similar. The same. Same little marquise cut, same thin band with the tiny notch in it. We found out later it was the same jeweler in the same town. He bought us the same ring. I still cannot get over that part. Of all the cruel things, that one keeps me up. He didn’t even bother to be original about it.