I found 247 text messages on my husband’s phone three months ago, and the first thing I did was start the pot roast.

I didn’t cry. I want to be honest with you about that, because I think a younger woman would have.

I just stood at the kitchen counter holding his phone, reading a name I’d never heard before. Kelsey. She works the front desk at his gym. And I peeled the potatoes anyway, because supper doesn’t make itself, and because some part of me had already gone very quiet and very still inside.

Dale and I have been married 23 years this October. Second go-round for both of us. He used to bring me coffee in bed every single morning, no sugar, just the way I like it, and he’d sit on the edge of the mattress while I drank it. That was our little thing for over twenty years. And bless his heart, he kept right on doing it through all of this. He brought me coffee the very morning after I read those messages. Sat down on the bed. Smiled at me. “Sleep okay, hon?” he asked. I said I slept fine. I drank every drop.

That night, after he was snoring away, I got up and opened my laptop at the kitchen table. I didn’t go looking at her pictures. I didn’t read the messages again. I opened a spreadsheet. Don’t ask me where that came from, because I’m not the spreadsheet type. Forty-some years of running a household, I suppose. I made my columns. Every asset. Every account. Every property in both our names. The house. The little cabin my daddy left me money to build. The truck. I sat there until almost three in the morning typing in numbers, and wouldn’t you know it, I felt calmer than I had in months.

By the second week I was making photocopies. Long story short, I’d wait until he left for the gym, that gym, and I’d go through the filing cabinet in his office. The mortgage. The car titles. His 401k statements. I made two copies of every single page and drove them over to my friend Donna’s house. She’s got one of those little fireproof safes in her hall closet, the kind folks keep for a flood. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked me, holding that first folder like it might bite. I just looked at her. “Hold onto it for me,” I said. “And don’t let Dale near your house.” She didn’t ask another question. Good women don’t.