I stood there and felt my skin go cold. He wasn’t talking about a mistress. He wasn’t talking about a random woman from the feed store. Odette was his daughter. My stepdaughter. The one we hadn’t seen or heard from in over a decade.

He started talking about how she had run away when she was nineteen and ended up in a bad situation over in the next state. He had been sending her money for months. That was the four hundred and thirty-seven dollars. It wasn’t for equipment. It was for her rent.

“She didn’t want you to know,” he whispered. “She was ashamed.”

I felt the room spinning. I thought he was cheating on me. I had spent weeks picturing him with some younger woman, feeling old and discarded. I had prepared myself for the end of my marriage. I had even looked up lawyers in the phone book.

But this was worse, somehow. He had been keeping a piece of our family history from me for all those years. He had been protecting her, sure. But he had been lying to me every single Tuesday for a year.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked him.

He looked at the floor. “She made me promise.”

I walked over to the window and looked out at the fields. The sun was setting, casting long, dark shadows across the porch. I realized then that Emmitt hadn’t just been hiding a secret. He had been choosing her over me for a long time.

He didn’t trust me enough to tell me she was in trouble. He thought I would be the one to judge her. He thought I would be the one to turn her away if he brought her back into our lives. And the worst part was, I wondered if he was right. I felt like a villain for even thinking about that.

I looked back at him. He looked so tired. He looked like an old man who had been carrying a boulder on his back for ten miles. I didn’t know whether to hug him or throw him out of the house. I felt hollowed out.

“She is coming here on Sunday,” he said quietly. “She needs a place to stay.”

I didn’t answer him. I just walked out of the kitchen and into the bedroom. I closed the door and locked it. I sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the house settle.

I realized I hadn’t been jealous of a woman. I had been jealous of a memory. I had been jealous of the way he looked at his daughter, even when she was just a ghost in our lives.

The next morning, I found a note on the nightstand. It was in his handwriting. He had written down her address and a phone number. He had also left a small pile of cash.

“I am sorry,” the note said. “I just wanted to fix what I broke.”