Week four, I opened my own checking account. Wells Fargo, the branch clear across town where not a soul knows us. I started moving two hundred dollars a week into it. Just two hundred. Nothing Dale would ever notice, and mind you, that man never balanced a checkbook a day in his life.

Every Friday, two hundred dollars. I’d sit in that parking lot afterward with my heart going like a rabbit, sixty-six years old and feeling like a bank robber over money that was already half mine.

By week eight I finally worked up the nerve to go see a lawyer. One of those free consultations they put on the radio. I wore my church clothes, if you can believe it. She looked over my spreadsheet and my folder of copies for a good long while, and then she set down her pen. “You’ve done more in eight weeks than most people manage in a year,” she said. Then she said the thing I keep hearing in my head at night. “You have everything.” I drove home, made a meatloaf, and Dale told me it was the best one I’d ever made. He even did the dishes. Go figure.

Now, here’s the part I haven’t told you yet. There was one more thing I found near the end. Something that made the girl at the gym, and the ring, and all of it, look like nothing at all. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up to the ring, because that’s where it all turned.

Week eleven is when I found the receipt. I was hunting for a stamp in his desk drawer, honest to God, just a stamp for a birthday card. And there it was, folded up under his checkbook. A jewelry store receipt. A ring. Four thousand, seven hundred dollars.

I read it twice just to be sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks. Our anniversary’s in October. The ring on my own hand right this minute cost twelve hundred dollars back in 2003, and Dale made a whole production about how that was a real stretch for us back then. This new one was four times that.

That one got to me, I’ll admit it. I sat right down on the carpet in his office, and I didn’t cry even then, but I came awful close. Twenty-three years. Coffee in bed every morning. And here he was buying that girl a ring near five thousand dollars while he told me we couldn’t afford to fix the back gutters this year.

But that receipt did me one favor. It made me look harder. Because a man doesn’t spend forty-seven hundred dollars he doesn’t have lying around. So that’s what sent me into the bank statements, the real digging, the thing I’d been too scared to do all along.