I wanted to scream. Throw something. But I just sat there.

“How long?”

“About four months. I met her at a coffee shop. She looked lost. I don’t know. We started talking. It just happened.”

I said, “You went to her mother’s house at three in the morning. You snuck out like a teenager. For four months.”

He covered his face.

“I know. I know. I’m sorry.”

But sorry doesn’t fix it. The truth was out. He was seeing another woman. A woman whose mother died too young. And he was drawn to that sadness. Or maybe just drawn to something I wasn’t giving him.

I’m not innocent. I can look back and see where I pulled away. Buried myself in work and the kids. Stopped asking about his day. Stopped touching him.

That’s not an excuse. But it’s part of the picture.

Emily Thompson is twenty-nine. She lives in her dead mother’s house. My husband went there to feel alive.

I don’t know what comes next. We haven’t talked about divorce. We haven’t talked at all. I’ve been sleeping in the guest room. He sleeps on the couch.

Every night I lie awake, listening for a phone that doesn’t ring anymore. But it’s not the call I’m afraid of now. It’s the silence that comes after.

A few days later, I found the obituary still on the kitchen table. It was wrinkled from my grip. I smoothed it out and read it again. He walked in and stopped when he saw me.

“Are you going to keep that?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

He poured himself a cup of coffee. “I called Emily last night. I told her it’s over.”

I didn’t look up. “Good.”

He waited for a beat. I didn’t give him anything else.

The obituary stayed there for another day. I finally threw it in the trash.

But I still saw it every time I passed the table, even after it was gone, like a ghost.

The next morning, he went out to get groceries. I stood in the living room with his phone in my hand. I knew the passcode. I checked. Clean. No call log, no messages. The past four months wiped out like they’d never happened.

When he came back, he put the bags on the counter without a word.

I said, “Are you going to tell me more?”

He shook his head. “There’s nothing more.”

Maybe that’s true. Maybe there isn’t.

But I still don’t sleep well. The phone doesn’t ring at 3 a.m. anymore. Now I just lie there in the dark, counting the hours. The silence is worse than the worry ever was. It’s the sound of something broken that won’t get fixed.