His tone made me feel good, as if I’d poked an open wound with a rusty nail.

“Oh,” I said. “I have to prepare for a case this afternoon anyway.”

With that, I left my stud husband in the kitchen with his plate of pancakes and the big lie he had told me. If I were an evil person, I would have killed him right then and there. But I’m not. I’m smarter than that.

Two days later, I went through the pockets of his shirt and slacks. Nothing. I was on a scavenger hunt. All alone. I needed to know who and what. I went by the Blue Door and saw Connor through the window as he worked a table. His handsome face caught the hanging light. He was beautiful. I wished he weren’t. I went there at least three times. I thought that my timing was off, so I had Marcy go to the restaurant for takeout. I texted Connor at different times of the day to see how long it took him to reply. Though the tools were not the same, I was acting like the woman my mother had become when my father cheated on her with his law partner’s wife. I looked at her with utter disgust back then. I told Mom that she was better than Dad. That she should just tell him to get lost and change the locks. God, how silly the advice of a fourteen-year-old must have seemed to a grown woman! Mom didn’t answer me. She just cried. It’s hard to unbraid a life with a man that you believe in. Like my mom did my father. Like I did with Connor Moss.

When I worked in the prosecutor’s office, I’d ask a defendant anything.

Why did you kill your baby?

Did you get pleasure from stabbing the victim?

Did the cigarette burns you gave your girlfriend arouse you?

Are you turned on by hurting someone?

Why did you molest your granddaughter?

The list goes on and on. I ask. They answer.

Yet, when it came to my own husband, I was Helen Keller. I was blind and mute. I couldn’t ask because I didn’t want the answer. I didn’t want to know for sure that he’d found a woman that he wanted more than me. I didn’t want to mess up the dreams that I had since before law school. Graduate. Get a good internship. A good firm. Meet a great guy. Get married. Have a baby. Make partner at the firm.

I stupidly skipped the one thing that turns out to matter the most.