I walked over to the wall. It was covered in photographs. Polaroids, mostly. A woman. She had the same hair I had back then. She had my build. She was sitting in our living room in photos I didn’t remember being taken. She was standing in our kitchen.

I looked at the desk in the corner. There was a stack of papers. A lease. I picked it up with shaking hands. $175 a month. It had been signed eleven years ago. The total came to $23,100 over the years.

The name on the lease wasn’t Dale. It was someone I knew. Someone from our church. Someone who had moved away in 2013.

I stood there for nine minutes. I timed it on my watch because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream. I just felt like the air had been sucked out of the world.

I finally walked out and called the police. I didn’t even go back home. I sat in my car and waited for the cruiser to pull up. The officer was kind, but when I showed him the photos, his face changed. He walked into that unit and didn’t come out for a long time.

“You know who this is?” the officer asked me when he finally walked back to his car. He was holding a file. “This woman was reported missing in 2013.”

I couldn’t breathe. “She’s the woman in the photos.”

“The last person who saw her alive,” the officer said, his voice dropping low, “was your husband’s business partner, Gary.”

I remembered Gary. He used to come over for Sunday dinner. He used to bring flowers. He used to look at me the way a man looks at someone he’s planning to hurt.

Dale never said a word. He didn’t come home that night. The police found him at the mill, and when they brought him in, he didn’t try to run. He just looked at me through the glass and gave me this small, sad smile.

“I tried to protect you,” he said.

“Protect me from what?” I asked.

“From knowing,” he said. “From what Gary did.”

I don’t know if he was lying. I think he probably was. I think he knew everything from the start and just chose to keep it quiet so he wouldn’t lose his perfect life.

The house is empty now. It’s been three months. I sold everything. I couldn’t stand the sight of the furniture or the way the kitchen looked in the morning light.

I am moving away tomorrow. I don’t know where I’m going, but it’s going to be somewhere with no locks and no secrets.

I still have the key. I don’t know why. I should throw it in the river, but sometimes I hold it in my palm just to remind myself that everything I thought was solid was actually made of glass.