The thing I couldn’t fix a story around was how he looked. He was getting thin. His belt was on a new hole, then another one. His color was off, kind of yellow-gray, and he was tired all the time, this bone-tired that sleep didn’t fix.

I kept saying, “Ray, you need to see Dr. Patel.” And he’d wave me off. “I’m fine, I’m just getting old like you.” And he’d grin at me. I let that grin shut me up every single time. I’m mad at myself about that now, but back then it worked.

Then the phone call happened, and that’s when my pretty little stories all fell apart at once. It was after midnight. Ray was in the shower and his phone lit up on the nightstand. I wasn’t going to look. I want that on the record. But it kept buzzing, and I picked it up just to silence it, and somehow I hit the green button by accident, and a woman’s voice came through. Soft. Warm. And she said his name like it was hers. “Ray? Ray, honey, are you there?” Honey. I set that phone down like it was hot. I didn’t say a word. I just hung it up and got back in bed and stared at the ceiling till the shower stopped.

I didn’t sleep that night, not one minute. I laid there doing the math a wife does. The cash. The dawn errands. The weight falling off him, because don’t they say men get vain and skinny when there’s somebody new? A soft voice calling my husband honey at midnight. I built the whole affair in my head, start to finish, and by sunrise I had decided I was going to catch him. I have never in my life done anything like what I did next, and I’d do it again, but I’m not proud of the shaking, mean person I was that morning.

So when he slid out of bed at five, I got up too. I waited till I heard the truck pull out, then I grabbed my keys and followed him. Stayed back a few cars like they do on TV, which is a ridiculous thing for a sixty-eight-year-old woman to be doing, mind you. He drove twenty minutes out past the highway to one of those low roadside motels, the kind with the doors that open right onto the parking lot. He parked. He walked up to room 12 and he knocked, soft, and the door opened and he went in. And I sat there in my car with both hands shaking on the wheel.