47,000 points. That’s what started all of this. A routine email from a grocery store rewards program, the kind you usually delete without reading. I almost did. But something made me click it, maybe boredom, maybe the fact that I’d been trying to figure out where all our grocery budget was going for months.

We weren’t buying any more food than usual. Actually we were buying less, since the kids were older and mostly out of the house. But the checking account told a different story every single month.

I logged into the loyalty account and just started scrolling. Honestly I figured I’d find a store that was closer to his office where he’d been stopping for lunch. That seemed like the most boring, logical explanation. What I found instead was a location I didn’t recognize. Danville. A town about 90 miles from where we live. I pulled up Google Maps because I genuinely thought maybe it was a suburb of somewhere nearby that I just hadn’t heard of. It wasn’t. It was 90 miles. A straight shot down one highway.

So I kept scrolling through the purchase history. And that’s when the items started jumping out at me. Baby formula. Diapers. Children’s Tylenol, the kind with the little cartoon on the box. Sippy cups. A package of those foam floor tiles you put down in a playroom. I had to stop and just sit there for a minute because our youngest, Callie, is 14 years old. We have not bought diapers in this house since the early 2000s. There are no babies in our family. No cousins nearby, no neighbors we’d shop for. Nothing like that.

I went back and looked at the dates. Every single Saturday. Sometimes early in the morning, sometimes around noon. For three years. I sat at the kitchen table for probably two hours going through it page by page.

I kept thinking there was going to be some explanation that would make me feel stupid for being suspicious. Like maybe he was picking things up for a coworker whose wife just had a baby. Maybe it was some kind of charity thing he’d forgotten to mention. I wanted an explanation so bad that I was basically inventing them for myself.