The vet called on a Thursday to remind me my dog was overdue for his rabies shot. Thing is, we don’t have a dog. We have a cat. I almost laughed and told her she had the wrong number.

Then she said my last name. “Mrs. Navarro, should we send the reminder to the Ridgewood address or the Elm one?”

We live on Elm. I’ve never lived on Ridgewood in my life. I said that, kind of slow, like I was waiting for her to catch the mistake. She didn’t catch anything. She just read it back to me like it was the most normal thing in the world. 14 Ridgewood Lane. A dog named Bruno. Registered under my husband, Marcus Navarro. Four years.

I need you to know what kind of marriage I thought I had. Marcus and I got married in 2018. He made the coffee every morning before I was even up. He coached our son Eli’s little league two springs in a row. And he swore, for years, that dogs made him sneeze. That’s the whole reason we never got a puppy. Eli begged and begged and Marcus would rub his nose and say, “Buddy, I can’t, I’d be miserable.” So we got a cat instead. Waffles. The cat was a compromise for his allergies.

Four years he’d had a dog. Twenty-two minutes from our front door.

I sat at the kitchen table after I hung up and I told myself a hundred stories. Identity mix-up. Some other Marcus Navarro. A clerical thing. But I couldn’t make myself believe any of them, so I called the vet back. I said I wanted to confirm the account. The girl pulled it up. There weren’t one dog on it.

There were two. And the emergency contact wasn’t me. It was a woman named Gina Reyes. There was a balance owed too. Sixty-two hundred dollars in vet bills.

I wrote the address on the back of an envelope and I stared at it for two days.

That Saturday I told Marcus I was running to Target. I drove to Ridgewood instead. I don’t even remember the drive, honestly. I just remember pulling up across the street and seeing the swing set in the side yard. A little pink tricycle tipped over on the porch. A minivan in the driveway with a car seat in the back. I told myself, okay, wrong house, this is a family, this isn’t anything.

Then a little girl came around the side of the house. Maybe eight years old. She had a tennis ball and a big goofy retriever bouncing after her. She laughed at something and turned her head, and I saw it. The dimple. Just the left side. The exact same one my son Eli has. The exact same one Marcus has when he really smiles, not the polite one, the real one.