My wife is gone now, and I go back in my memory, in that weathered chair looking out at the blackness of Hood Canal, and think. A few lights flicker across the water. I hear a seal dive in from the swim float out in front of me.

She’s gone now.

Sophie is gone.

I replay the moments of our life together. First, as a kind of greatest-hits montage. When we met. When I couldn’t get her out of my mind and knew that she was the one. When we took that trip to Paris before we got married. Her beautiful smile. Her laugh. How she begged me to make an offer on that house in Mount Baker because her artist’s sensibility saw an amazing home, while I saw a money pit.

And then the flip side, the B-side.

How I noticed that I was no longer the only one of the two of us who worked late into the night. I was trying to show my boss, Carrie, how serious I was about my career. And really, nothing more. She absolutely flirted with me, but she did that with anyone who made eye contact with her and didn’t have a sandbag stomach. And Sophie, she started texting me just before the time I’d head for my car for the soul-crushing commute up I-5 and home.

No rush tonight. Big project here.

Made a boneheaded mistake on a display for China. Thank God we caught it in time.

Janna and I are grabbing a drink.

New concept taking more time than I’d like. Might need to camp out here.

SAM has a reception tonight. Going after work.

I knew in my bones what was going on with Sophie, but I couldn’t bring myself to confront her about it. At work I’m direct, because that’s the role I’ve chosen to play to move my career forward. With Sophie, for some strange reason, I just couldn’t be that way. I was so lucky to have her as my wife. So proud of her. By being with her, I was somehow a better person. Smarter. More successful. Even better looking. Make no mistake: having Sophie on my arm was never about showing her off as some kind of wifely accessory. I was the accessory. I was the lucky SOB that had the woman any man would have wanted.

The truth is, I didn’t actually want to know for sure what she was doing and, getting to the point, with whom she was doing it. To know there was another man between us was something I just couldn’t quite process. I never really cheated on her. I could have. I had my offers. My boss, but she doesn’t count. The cute girl sitting next to me at the oyster bar in Heathrow. The girl who watered the plants in our building before cost-cutting measures pushed the duty onto the employees.

Sophie cheating on me was like a cancer diagnosis that never really came—because knowing meant dealing with it. I could feel the tumor growing inside, getting bigger and bigger. First a walnut, then a peach, now a cantaloupe pressing against my rib cage and reminding me that I needed to see a doctor. Sophie’s affair was my tumor, the one I was prepared to ignore until I quietly dropped dead in my sleep. None the wiser. Going peacefully.