The key fit. Of course it fit. I knew it would the second I saw the padlock, but feeling it click open is a whole different thing. I rolled that door up and the smell hit me first.

Coffee, and a man’s deodorant, the same kind Frank’s worn since the Reagan years. And then I saw the rest. A mattress right there on the floor. A little mini fridge humming in the corner. A coffee maker. A toothbrush standing up in a cup. A phone charger plugged into the wall, like somebody lived there. Because somebody did.

I want to tell you I kept my composure. I didn’t. I just stood in that doorway with my purse hugged to my chest like an old fool. There was a folding table with a stack of mail on it, his name on every piece, this address printed plain as day. I picked up the electric bill, because I’m the one who handles our bills at home, force of habit. On the back there was that little usage chart. Tuesdays. Thursdays. Saturdays. Lights on, meter running, somebody home. And it soaked into me slow, the way cold water soaks through a coat. He comes home to me the other four nights. The rest of the week he had all of this.

Now I have to back up a minute, because I keep skipping the part that matters. Months ago, maybe last spring, Frank mentioned a new gal at the office. “We hired a bookkeeper,” he said over his eggs. “Sandra. Sharp as a tack.” I didn’t think a thing of it. Why would I. You hear a name and it goes right past you, and then one day that name is standing in your own kitchen and you can’t get a full breath.

Because that’s the next thing I saw. Taped to the wall above that sad little mattress was a photograph. A real printed one, not a phone screen. And it wasn’t taken in that storage unit. It was taken in my kitchen. My kitchen. I knew my own cabinets, my own window over the sink. There was Frank, grinning like a boy, his arm around a woman. And the woman was wearing my bathrobe. The blue one with the little flowers, the one my sister gave me two Christmases back. She had it tied at the waist and a coffee cup in her hand and she was laughing.