She picked up on the second ring. Friendly. Busy-mom voice. I asked if I was speaking to Gina Reyes and she said yeah, who’s this. I didn’t know how to start, so I just said his name. “I’m calling about Marcus.”

There was this long pause. Then she said, kind of careful, “Is he okay? Did something happen at work?” And I realized she thought I was from his job. She thought he had a job that sent him out of town on weekends. The same lie. The exact same lie he told me.

I said, “I’m his wife.” And she laughed, this short confused little laugh, and said, “No, honey, I think you’ve got the wrong Marcus.” So I described him. The dimple. The way he rubs his nose. Eli, our son. Our house on Elm.

She got real quiet. Then she said something I’m still hearing in my head. “We’ve been married nine years.”

Nine. I married him in 2018. She married him in 2015. I sat down right there on my kitchen floor with the phone against my ear. She was the wife. The first one. The real one, the legal one. The whole time he wasn’t cheating on me with her. He was cheating on her with me. I wasn’t even married. I’d just signed a piece of paper a man who already had a wife had no business signing.

We stayed on the phone for almost two hours, two women trading the same memories with the dates shuffled around. She knew his allergy line too. He told her he was allergic to cats. That’s why they had dogs.

Gina was the one who finally said it out loud, the thing I couldn’t. “He told you he can’t have a dog and he told me he can’t have a cat. He just picked whichever lie kept us apart.”

I haven’t filed anything yet. I haven’t told Eli. Marcus is staying at his brother’s and he keeps texting me paragraphs about how he was “going to fix it.” I don’t answer. Last night Gina texted me a photo of her daughter, the girl with the dimple, and underneath it she wrote, “Our kids are going to have to meet someday.”

I read it about nine times. I still don’t know what I’m supposed to say back.