“I need to go, Kayla,” I said. My voice sounded thin, like someone else was talking.

“Are you sure? You look kind of pale,” she said.

I didn’t say another word. I stood up and walked to the door. I told her I had a headache. I told her I needed to lie down. She left, bless her heart, and the moment the front door clicked shut, the silence in the house became the loudest thing I had ever heard.

Roscoe drives a truck. He has been gone four nights a week for twenty-two years. I spent those years keeping the house, paying the bills, and waiting for the sound of his engine in the driveway. I thought I knew where he was. I thought I knew who he was.

I went to the desk in the hallway. I pulled out the ledger where I keep our bank statements. I started adding up the numbers.

For the last three years, there was an automatic withdrawal every month. $1,900. It was listed as a business expense, something Roscoe told me was for insurance and fuel surcharges. I had asked him about it once, back when Harold still had the shop, and Roscoe had just looked at me with that tired, honest-looking face of his.

“It is just the cost of doing business, Martha,” he had said. “You don’t want me losing the contract, do you?”

I had let it go. A lie don’t get better sitting in a drawer, but I had put it there anyway.

I had trusted him. I had made his meals and washed his uniforms and counted the days until he came home.

I looked back at the screen. The woman’s name was Sarah. I recognized her face from somewhere. I sat there for a long time, just staring at the screen until my eyes burned.

Then it hit me like a physical blow. She was the woman who had worked at the diner in the next town over, the one where Roscoe used to stop for coffee before he got his own route. That was fifteen years ago. He had told me she quit and moved to Atlanta.

I stood up and went to the closet. I pulled down his old duffel bag, the one he keeps in the back of the truck. I hadn’t touched it in years, but today I needed to see.

I unzipped it. It was full of clothes, but tucked into the side pocket was a stack of receipts. They weren’t for fuel. They were for groceries, for toys, for school supplies. They were all dated for the days he told me he was stuck in a motel in Mississippi.

Three weeks later.

He came home on a Thursday evening, just like he always did. He walked through the door, dropped his keys on the counter, and gave me a kiss on the cheek. He smelled like diesel and stale cigarettes.