The perfume on his collar wasn’t mine. Jasmine. I don’t wear jasmine, never have, it gives me a headache. Dave was in the shower and his jacket was hanging on the kitchen chair, and I stood there holding the collar up to my nose like some crazy woman. Twenty-nine years married. I had never once gone through his things.

That night I did.

His wallet was normal. Receipts, normal. Then in the inside pocket my fingers hit something hard and cold, and I pulled out a key. Small brass one. Not our house key. Not his office. It had a little paper tag tied to it with string, and somebody had written “7B” on the tag in pen. An apartment number. I stood in my own kitchen holding it while the shower ran, and I didn’t say a word. I put it back exactly where I found it.

I have to tell you, before all this, we were fine. Or I thought we were. Dave proposed to me at Bella Roma on Fifth Street, the corner booth, 29 years ago, with a ring he’d been paying off in pieces. He still kissed my cheek every single night when he walked in at 6:30. He still called me “kid” even though I’m two years older than him. That’s the man I thought I knew.

I barely slept. By morning I’d convinced myself of the worst, and honestly the worst felt almost simple. Another woman. People survive that. So after he left for work I got in my car with that key copied at the hardware store, and I drove to every apartment complex within five miles of our house. I felt insane doing it. The third one was called Ridgeview. Gray buildings, kid’s bike chained to a railing. I walked up to 7B with my heart going like a hammer, and the key slid in like it had been cut for my own front door.

I opened it.

A one-bedroom. Clean. Way too clean for a bachelor pad, that was the first thing that hit me. The curtains were drawn. There were shirts in the closet I recognized, Dave’s shirts, the blue check one I bought him. His razor sat by the bathroom sink. A coffee mug in the drying rack. And the whole place smelled like jasmine. That same smell off his collar, but heavier now, soaked into everything.

I went looking for her things. I wanted a woman’s clothes, makeup, something to make me hate him cleanly. Instead, on the little kitchen table, I found a lease agreement. Two names on it. Dave’s. And a woman named Connie Baxter. Eighteen months. Thirteen hundred and fifty dollars a month. I did the math standing there like a fool. Twenty-four thousand dollars he’d been moving somewhere I couldn’t see.

Connie.