“His sister,” she said slowly. “Linda. He said his sister Linda lived in Charlotte and she had problems and he had to go take care of her every other weekend.” And there it was. I’m Linda.

I’m the sister. He’d done the exact same thing to her that he’d done to me, just flipped. To me, she was Diane the sick sister in Knoxville. To her, I was Linda the troubled sister in Charlotte. We were each other’s cover story. Neither of us was real to him. We were both just the lie he told the other one.

For a second neither of us said anything. Two women on two ends of a phone line, both of us holding the same blood pressure prescription, both of us his wife, both of us his “sister.” Then she started to cry, and I realized I wasn’t crying anymore. I was just empty. “We have two kids,” she finally said. “Ten and seven.” I have no kids. Fourteen years and he always said the timing was never right. Now I knew where the right time went.

I told her about the laptop. The mortgage, the forms, the signatures. She kept saying “no, no, no” real soft, not to me, just to the air. Before she hung up she asked me one thing, and her voice broke clean in half on it. “Is he there?” she said. “Is he with you right now?” And that’s the part that finishes me, every time I tell it. Because the answer was no. He wasn’t with either of us. It was a Saturday. Every other weekend. He’d told me he was in Atlanta and told her he was helping his sister Linda in Charlotte.

He was somewhere neither of us could name, and for the first time in fourteen years I had absolutely no idea who I’d been married to. I still don’t. I’ve got the papers, the lawyer, the whole thing in motion. But I haven’t been able to throw out his pill bottle. It’s still sitting in my cup holder. I don’t know why I keep it. I think some dumb part of me is still standing at that pharmacy counter, waiting for her to look up and say she got it wrong.