Now, when he returns home to retrieve the offending wallet, she’ll be ready for him. Ready to pounce while he’s still behind the wheel, without letting him even stand so he can utilize his height against her. He always uses this against her in an argument, but not this time. “This will be a full-on attack,” she surprises herself by saying aloud, and she begins to steel herself to the notion. Shove the thing right in his face and demand an answer. Better yet, grab the ring from his hand as it dangles out the window, the way it always does when he drives on balmy days like this. Grab it and run off across the lawn before he knows what hit him—if she can make it around the side yard, back to the pool house and lock herself in, then she stands a decent chance of finding the truth. A moment where she can test the ring against the spots. The circles. These circular wells of truth that stand in sharp relief to the rest of his wallet.

It’s not that the truth would even start to suggest that he’s done anything wrong, at least in the biblical sense or in a court of law. Not at all. It wouldn’t immediately say that he has cheated on her or that another woman or man or whatever he’s drawn to—she hardly knows him, she fully realizes now, even after twenty-some years—is waiting out there, ready to join his life. It merely states, in no uncertain terms, that he is open to it. That on the road, he prefers to appear a single man. Unconnected to her. Alone. And this tears at her very soul, this idea. Her ring has grown tight and tarnished on her gnarled left hand, never even removed during shampooing or gardening. Not once, even during those painful months of pregnancy when her digits ballooned to twice their normal size, did she take off her wedding band. And what she’s found, or believes she’s found, paints a very different portrait of her marriage than the one she carries in the family room of her mind. The den of her dreams. This deceit in his wallet speaks of another life, a life that he has lived out for years now, happily without her.