“You weren’t here,” she said. She walked over to the table and picked up the envelope. “You are never here. You’re always on a rig, or a job, or somewhere else. I got tired of waiting for a ghost to come home.”

I looked at her. Really looked at her. We had been married for twelve years. I thought I knew every line on her face. But standing there, she looked like a stranger. I thought about the phone calls. The times I’d call at 2:00 AM because I had a break, and she would pick up sounding groggy and annoyed. I always thought she was just tired. I never thought she was checking the clock, waiting for me to hang up so she could get back to whatever she was actually doing.

“I was doing this for us,” I said. It sounded weak even to me.

“No,” she said. “You were doing this for you. You like the work. You like the paycheck. You don’t like being a husband.”

She reached into her purse and pulled out a set of keys. She dropped them on the table. They hit the wood with a sharp clack. “The house is listed. The realtor is coming by tomorrow to take photos. You can stay tonight, but you need to be out by noon.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I felt like I had walked into a different house.

A house where I didn’t belong. I walked over to the fridge and opened it. Empty. Just a bottle of mustard and a half-full gallon of milk. I closed it.

“Who did you sell it to?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. She grabbed her suitcase handle. “I’m moving to Phoenix. My sister has a place.”

I watched her walk toward the front door. I should have stopped her. I should have grabbed her arm or demanded to see the receipts or called a lawyer. But I just stood there. My brain was stuck on the number $42,980. That was the transmission repair, the new deck, the vacation we talked about. That was three months of my life, gone in a keystroke.

“Wait,” I said.

She paused with her hand on the knob. She didn’t turn around.

“Was there someone else?” I asked.

She sighed. It was a long, shaky sound. “There was always someone else, Wendell. It was just never you.”

She opened the door and walked out. The heat rushed into the room, heavy and dry. I stood in the doorway and watched her get into her car. She didn’t look back. She didn’t wave. She just backed out of the driveway and drove away until she was just a cloud of dust on the horizon.