I want to tell you I did something dramatic. I didn’t. I just sat there with both licenses in my lap, one in each hand, looking back and forth like the names would switch if I stared hard enough.

A nurse walked past and asked if I was okay and I said yes. I actually said I’m fine, thank you. I sat in that hallway for almost an hour. Hands in my lap. People walked around me. Somewhere down the hall my husband was lying in a bed with a broken collarbone and a second name, and I just sat there.

I didn’t go in to see him. I think about that a lot. He was right there, twenty feet away, and I could have walked in and asked him to his face. Instead I got up, walked out to the parking garage, put the address into my phone, and started driving. I don’t fully understand why. Part of me thinks I didn’t want him to lie to me, and as long as he was unconscious or whatever, he couldn’t. The truth was sitting at that address, and I wanted to see it before anyone could explain it away.

The drive took almost three hours. I don’t remember most of it. I remember stopping for gas and buying a pack of gum I didn’t open. I remember calling my sister and hanging up before it rang. I kept thinking, there’s an explanation. People have reasons. Maybe it’s a work thing, a fake name for some business, I genuinely tried to build a story where this was fine. By the time I got off the highway I had built about four of them and none of them held together.

The house was a blue Cape Cod. Nice. Nicer than ours, honestly, and that thought made me feel sick in a way I can’t really describe.

There were little solar lights along the walkway. A kid’s bike on its side in the grass. I parked across the street and sat there for a few minutes telling myself I could still leave. Nobody knew I was here. I could turn around right now and pretend I never opened that wallet. I almost did. I think part of me already knew, though, and you can’t un-know a thing once you’ve started driving toward it.

So I walked up and I knocked.

She was younger than me. Maybe by five years, maybe more, I’m bad at that. Friendly face. And she said the thing about Paul being stuck at work, and that’s when it really landed, because she wasn’t suspicious of me at all. She thought I was a neighbor, or selling something. She had no reason in the world to think the woman on her porch was anyone important.

I said, “His name is David. He was in a car accident this morning. He’s in the hospital. I’m his wife.”