David got home at 6:15. He kissed the top of my head like he always does. “Smells good,” he said about dinner. I’d made pot roast. His favorite. I don’t even know why I made his favorite.

I think I was on autopilot. We sat down at the table, the four of us. Marcus was on his phone. Emma was talking about a group project. David was eating and nodding. Normal Tuesday.

I waited until the kids cleared their plates and went upstairs. I could hear Marcus’s bedroom door close. I could hear Emma’s music through the floor. Then I looked at David and said, “Who’s Rebecca?”

He didn’t even look up at first. He was scraping the last of the gravy off his plate. “Hm?” Like he hadn’t heard me. Or like the name meant nothing.

“Rebecca Marsh,” I said. “Your wife. On your other insurance plan.”

The fork stopped. He looked at me and I watched his face go through about four different things in two seconds. Confusion, then recognition, then something that almost looked like relief. That’s the part I keep coming back to. He looked relieved. Like he’d been waiting to get caught.

“Cat,” he said. “Let me explain.”

“You have two kids with her,” I said. “Lily and Owen. Six and four.”

He put the fork down. He pushed his plate away. He didn’t deny it. Not for one second. He just sat there looking at his hands and said, “It’s complicated.”

I laughed. I actually laughed. “It’s complicated? You have a second family, David. You’ve had one since before Marcus started high school. That’s not complicated. That’s a whole other life.”

He tried to tell me it started as a mistake. An affair that went too far.

She got pregnant and he couldn’t walk away. I said, “She got pregnant twice.” He didn’t have an answer for that. He said he loved me. He said he loved our kids. He said he’d been trying to figure out how to end it for years. I asked him what specifically he’d done to end it in eight years. He went quiet.

Then I asked the thing I actually needed to know. “Why’d you give them the better plan?”

He looked confused. Like of all the questions I could ask, that one didn’t make sense to him. “What?”

“The premium plan, David. $780 a month. You told me we couldn’t afford it. You told me the basic plan was all we could budget. And you gave her the good one.”

He said, “The kids were little. They needed more doctor visits. It was just practical.”