The key was small and brass, and in forty-one years of washing that man’s coats I’d never once seen it. It was down in the lining, where the pocket had worn a little hole through.

Not a house key. Too small for that. The kind of thing that opens a padlock. I sat at the kitchen table and held it for a good twenty minutes, just turning it over and over in my fingers. Frank was at work. And I’ll be honest with you, my hands knew something was wrong before my head did.

Now you have to understand, my Frank is a man of habit. Forty-one years married and I could’ve set the clock by him. Two eggs over easy. Same chair. Same grumble about the morning news. He kissed my cheek every single day before he left and called it “checking out for the day,” like he was a guest at a hotel. We laughed about that line for years. He wasn’t a romantic man, never was, but he was steady. Steady was the thing I loved most about him. So a strange little key scared me worse than lipstick on a collar ever could have.

I should’ve waited. I know that. A sensible woman waits and asks her husband at supper. But I’m not always a sensible woman, and that morning something just got into me. There’s a storage place out on Industrial Boulevard, one of those long rows of orange doors behind a chain-link fence. Frank drives past it every morning on his way to the plant. I don’t even know why I thought of it. Gut feeling, I guess. I dropped the key in my purse and drove out there with my heart going like a scared rabbit.

The girl at the front desk couldn’t have been much older than my granddaughter. I leaned on that counter and tried to sound like a woman who knew exactly what she was doing. “My husband rents here,” I said. “Last name Devlin.” She typed something and didn’t even bother to look up at me. “Unit 31B,” she said. “Paid through March.” I thanked her and walked out into that long row of doors, reading the numbers off one by one, and my legs felt like they belonged to some other woman.