He wouldn’t look at me. Just kept his hands moving on those plastic-wrapped garments. “It’s just a clerical thing. Happens sometimes.”

“Mike.” I kept my voice low. “Whose account is on Fenmore?”

He wiped down the counter even though it didn’t need wiping. That’s the detail I keep coming back to for some reason. That cloth going back and forth over clean countertop.

I asked him how long he’d known.

He stopped wiping. Looked up at me finally. “Since 2019,” he said. Just like that. Flat, like he’d been waiting years to just get it over with.

He told me a woman comes every other Friday. Picks up a few items, always pays cash. He set up the second account himself. Dennis asked him to. He said Dennis told him it was easier for keeping the work stuff separate, and Mike said he didn’t ask questions. Said he didn’t think it was his place.

I drove home and I sat in my car in the driveway for a long time before I went inside.

I did not confront Dennis that night. I’m not proud of that. But I needed to know more before I opened my mouth, because I know Dennis. I know how he talks around things. I needed something solid in my hand before I looked him in the eye.

So I went back to the dry cleaner the next Friday morning and I parked down the block and I waited.

She pulled in at ten after ten. Little blue sedan, nice enough. She was maybe ten years younger than me, dark hair, wearing a light jacket. Pretty. I noticed her shoes right away because they were practical, the kind a person who’s on their feet a lot wears. I don’t know why I remember that.

There was a boy in the backseat. Buckled into a booster seat, looking out the window.

Maybe four years old, maybe a little older. He had Dennis’s forehead. The same wide, flat forehead Dennis’s mother always called distinguished. I saw it from across a parking lot and I knew.

She had a ring on her left hand.

I sat in my car and watched her come out carrying a wrapped garment bag and put it in the trunk, and buckle the little boy back in, and drive away. And I just sat there.

I don’t even remember deciding to go to the county clerk’s office. I think I just drove there because there was nowhere else to go and I needed to know the number on it. The actual date.

Marriage certificate. Dennis Paul Caldwell and Maria Elena Santos. Filed March 14, 2019.

We were married in 1999. We are still married. I have never filed for divorce. There is no death certificate with my name on it. I am sitting here alive in a cardigan I bought at Kohl’s, and my husband apparently married another woman while I was alive and going about my life.