I didn’t cry. That’s the part that surprises me even now. I thought I’d be a puddle on the floor, and instead I got real quiet and real cold inside, like a freezer humming. I didn’t call him at work either.

What was I going to say into the phone? Nothing I’d say into a phone would be enough. No, I had a better idea, and that idea kept me up most of that night staring at the ceiling while he snored next to me like a man with a clean conscience.

The next morning he kissed the top of my head, said “see you at lunch,” and left for his “golf.” And I want you to understand, I almost didn’t go through with it. I sat in my own driveway in my car with my purse in my lap for a good ten minutes. Part of me wanted to just drive to St. Luke’s and scream the roof down. But another part, the meaner part, the part that had been ironing my good blue dress at midnight, that part said no. You’re going to walk in there calm. You’re going to sit down. And you’re going to watch.

I’d ironed that blue dress until there wasn’t a wrinkle left on God’s earth. I don’t know why that mattered so much to me, but it did. If I was going to walk into another woman’s church and find my husband, I was going to look like somebody’s wife. Because I was. I am.

St. Luke’s is bigger than ours, fancier, with one of those wide front lobbies and a coffee station. A young usher with a name tag handed me a bulletin and said “good morning, are you new with us?” And wouldn’t you know it, I smiled and said “just visiting family.” Which was true, in a sideways kind of way.

I saw him before he saw me. He was four rows up on the left, in a gray sweater I bought him for his birthday, the one he told me he “left at the gym.” Next to him was a woman about my age, maybe a little younger, brown hair, a soft pink coat. And on her other side, two grown kids and a little one, a toddler, bouncing a juice box on his knee. A juice box. I stood in the back of that church holding my bulletin and I looked at that little boy and something in my chest just went very, very still.

I’ll tell you the part I’m not proud of. I almost left. I almost just turned around and walked out and drove home and put dinner in the oven like always, because seeing it is so much heavier than knowing it. But my feet wouldn’t go backward. So I walked up that center aisle in my good blue dress, and I slid right into the pew, right next to Diane. Not next to Mark. Next to her.