I was standing at the CVS counter with Brian’s blood pressure refill, same as I’d done maybe a hundred times, when the pharmacist looked at her screen, then at me, then back at the screen, and asked which wife I was.

I actually laughed. I thought I’d misheard her over the music they pipe in. “Excuse me?” I said. She didn’t laugh back. “Ma’am, there are two women on this policy with the same last name. Both listed as spouse.”

I just stared at her. My brain kind of stopped working for a second. She turned the monitor a little, like she wanted me to see she wasn’t making it up. “One here,” she said. “One in Knoxville.” Then she said the thing that I keep hearing in my head even now, weeks later. “The other Mrs. Carter picked up this same medication last week. Knoxville location.”

Let me back up, because I need you to understand how normal my life felt that morning. Brian and I had been married fourteen years. He forgets his pills, always has, so I’m the one who refills them. That was just my little job in the marriage. He’d text me “thank you babe” with the heart, every single time, like clockwork. He traveled a lot for work. Charlotte, Nashville, Atlanta. He sold industrial equipment, or that’s what I thought he did, and he was gone every other weekend. I never once questioned it. I’m not stupid. I just trusted my husband.

I drove home from CVS and I don’t remember the drive at all. Not one light, not one turn. I got to my own driveway and I couldn’t make myself go inside. I sat there for forty minutes with the engine off, his pill bottle in the cup holder, just looking at the garage door.

Part of me wanted to call him right then. Part of me already knew that whatever I was about to find was sitting on his laptop in the office, and that once I looked I could never un-look. I went inside.

His laptop password was our anniversary. That should’ve felt sweet. It just felt like a joke now. The first thing I opened was the email, and the first thing I saw was a second mortgage. Not on our house. A house in Knoxville. My hands were shaking so bad I had to scroll with one finger. Then school enrollment forms. Two kids. A boy and a girl. And on the parent line, both of them, mother and father, the father signature was his. I’d know his handwriting anywhere. He signs his B like a fishhook.