It was a Venmo notification. That’s all. Forty five dollars, from my Frank, to somebody named Brittany. The little memo just said one word. “Tuesday.” I sat there on the edge of the bed with my glasses halfway down my nose, and I read that word about ten times before it meant anything to me.

I’ll be honest with you, I almost let it go. Frank handles odd jobs for half the neighborhood, always has. I figured Brittany was somebody’s daughter he helped move a couch for. But something made me tap into the history, and that’s where my stomach started doing something funny. Every Tuesday. Forty five dollars. Going back nine months. Same girl. Same little word.

Then it wasn’t always forty five. Some weeks it was eighty. One week it was two hundred and fifty with no memo at all, just gone, like he didn’t want to write down what it was for. And here’s the thing about me, and maybe it’s a flaw, I don’t know. I didn’t ask him. I didn’t cry or throw the phone. I just got real quiet inside and I started watching. Twenty seven years married will do that to you, I guess. You learn to look before you leap.

Frank and I, we weren’t some sad story. I want you to know that. We met at a church potluck when I still had brown hair, and he was the kind of man who warmed my car up in the winter before I even came outside. Forty five years that man warmed my car. We raised two kids, buried two parents, paid off this little house together. There’s a wedding photo on my kitchen wall, the two of us looking like babies, and I used to walk past it a hundred times a day and never even see it anymore. Funny how that works.

So I watched. I’m not proud of how I did it, going through his statements while he snored. But once I started I couldn’t stop, because every place I looked there was something new. His credit card had a storage unit on it. A hundred and twenty nine dollars a month, every month, like clockwork. We don’t have anything in storage. I mean it, nothing. We’ve got a garage full of junk right here, what on earth would Frank be paying to store?

His phone bill is what really got me though. Three hundred and forty text messages to one number, and the area code was Ohio. We live in Georgia, mind you. We don’t know a soul in Ohio. I sat at the kitchen table that morning with my coffee going cold, trying to think of one single person we knew up there, and I couldn’t. Three hundred and forty. To a stranger. From the man who’d been sleeping next to me for half my life.