She pulls the wallet closer now, to inspect it a bit more carefully. It’s one of the two she’s given him over the years, a birthday or Father’s Day gift that had, at the time, been much appreciated. Items had been transferred almost immediately from the previous billfold into the new one, as if to physically display approval. Driving license, cash money, that lucky Mexican peso that he had found in the dirt of a roadside rest stop on the way to San Diego. Looking at it now, the wallet in question, she can’t decide if this is the first one or the second—black leather isn’t very forthcoming with details. But she had given it to him, of this she is certain.

How long would it take to create a mark like this one? A year, maybe three? Longer? And in strange, sporadic intervals. True, he travels once or twice a month in his work, but only for days at a time. No more than a week. It would take quite a while for wear of this kind to make itself known. Many repetitions. If she lets herself drift for a moment, she can imagine the often-repeated scenario, see him pulling the ring off his finger in the airport lounge and then tucking it safely away. Or perhaps earlier. In the taxi or even just as he slips out the front door. For once the deception begins, one never knows how quickly the disease may spread.

She sits down on the edge of their California queen, slumping almost, to rest on the plaid comforter that adorns this bed in their master suite. A first-floor master, the kind she’d always dreamed of when they were younger and poorer and happier. Much, much happier than this. This moment in which she has now discovered the circle. A circle that will surely lead to the fiery depths of hell as quickly as any path in the pages of Dante. She looks at it again, this insignificant coin pocket that now seems to hold the key, the missing key to all the silences and layovers and business trips and the slow, seeping death that has crept into her marriage. Into the very fiber of her life. And bones. She studies it, the ringlet, turning it this way and that as she holds it up to the skylight overhead. Not very scientific, to be sure, but she’s not operating in the world of science right now. No. Her thoughts are being fueled by pain and anger and sorrow and doubt. A kind of science, perhaps, the science of emotions, but not a very practical one. Not one that wins any Nobel prizes or cures any cancer or helps any young children sit up straight and walk again. This empirical path leads in one direction only—to the land of regret.