“Hi Donald. Hi Elise. It’s Adrienne,” each message would begin, as if we were one big happy ménage à trois. Then she would proceed to either ask a favor (“Could either of you possibly be able to let the phone people into my apartment on . . . ?” ), impart information (“My moving date has been pushed up a day to Friday, January fourteenth . . . ”), or, in my opinion, simply torture (“It won’t be long now: only six more weeks . . . !”). If she ever managed to get Donald on the phone, I never knew about it. Which began to make me suspicious:

Were these innocuous messages really that innocent? Were they a smoke screen, containing coded instructions for scheduling phone dates, romantic trysts? Was she calling him—and reaching him—privately on his cell phone? Were they having long, secret, nostalgic conversations full of sadness and regret about the dog, about New York, about the past which I knew nothing about?

Initial investigations into these variations of the same question turned up nothing. As I had done in the past, after Donald would fall asleep, I’d creep downstairs to his study and snoop. Only now, my techniques for infiltration were a little more sophisticated. I’d find his cell phone, press the automatic voicemail retrieval button on the keypad (he had programmed it so his access code and password didn’t have to be reentered every time), and scroll through the list of incoming calls he’d received. Then, with the slim metal phone pressed to my ear, my heart pounding with guilt, I’d listen to any messages he had received or saved. But they were all unincriminating: the dry cleaner calling about shirts he’d forgotten to pick up; a school administrator scheduling an English department meeting; a parent thanking him for giving a child another chance on a pop quiz. Tiptoeing back up the stairs afterwards, I couldn’t help feeling incredibly foolish: every time I looked, I found nothing. When would I give up the search?

Never.

No matter how many times an investigative mission came up empty, I never felt relieved or secure.

Because I knew it was only a matter of time before I hit pay dirt.