“She gets the baby. You get me.”

I believed him for 11 days. Maybe I wanted to believe him. That is the uglier truth.

The hotel was the Garden Inn by the interstate. Room 218 the first time, 306 the second, 114 the last. I paid cash once. He paid twice with a company card he said Marlene never saw because his bookkeeper handled everything. The twist of the knife is that I sent flowers to Marlene the next Monday. Blue hydrangeas. $47.91. I signed the card, “Praying for you and baby Eli.”

I can hear how awful that is. I was right there in her house, in her life, pretending I was the one holding her up.

A week later, Marlene called me at 9:12 at night. I was sitting at my kitchen table eating Saltines because I had not gone grocery shopping. My phone lit up with her name, and for one stupid second I thought she was calling about church nursery duty.

She did not cry.

She said she had opened the paper statement for Wade’s business card because it came to the house by mistake. Three hotel charges. Two lunches at Paloma’s. One florist charge with my name printed because I used my rewards number.

I tried to say her name. She interrupted me.

“Don’t say sorry yet,” she said. “Tell me what he promised you.”

My mouth went dry. I could hear a ceiling fan clicking on her end of the line, steady as a metronome.

I almost lied. Then she said something I was not ready for.

“Tessa, I know about the first woman.”

That was when Wade walked into my apartment without knocking, using the key I had been stupid enough to give him. Marlene stayed on the line. She told me to put her on speaker.

“Tell him to listen,” she said. Her voice wasn’t shaking. It was cold.

Wade stood in my kitchen, looking confused. He had his work boots on, mud tracking across my linoleum. He didn’t know Marlene was listening. He started to reach for me, talking about how he’d finally leave her once the nursery was finished.

“I’m done with the waiting,” he said.

I looked at the phone on the counter. The call timer was still running.

“Wade,” I said. “Marlene knows.”

He froze. Then he laughed, a short, sharp sound. He told me she was bluffing. He said she didn’t have the guts to do anything about it.

“She’s too scared,” he said.

That was when I realized what he really was. He wasn’t trapped. He was just a man who liked having two women to lie to. I looked at the receipts sitting on my kitchen table, the ones I hadn’t burned. I had the records of every dollar he had spent.

I grabbed the folder. I didn’t care about the affair anymore. I cared about the money.