A sheen of sweat formed on his forehead as he scrambled for an explanation. “It’s just a prank, Car—”

“Bullshit,” I interrupted, tears spilling down my face. A nameless figure took form in my mind—the woman who owned those tiny black panties—and I understood, for the first time in my life, the incalculable fury that drives some people to murder. “You didn’t get much work done at the office on Friday, did you?”

James didn’t reply; his silence was as damning as an admission.

I knew then I couldn’t trust anything else he said. I suspected he’d not only seen the black panties with his own eyes, but he’d probably pulled them off her. James rarely found himself short for words; if nothing serious had happened between the two of them, he’d be adamantly defending himself now. Instead, he remained mute, guilt written all over his crestfallen face.

The secret—his actual infidelity—was bad enough. But in this exact moment, the raw, ugly questions about her, and the extent of their relationship, seemed less critical than his harboring of the secret for months. What if I hadn’t found the phone? How long would he have hidden this from me? Just last night, we’d made love. How dare he bring that woman’s ghost to our bed, the sacred place where we’d been trying to conceive a child.

My shoulders shook, my hands trembled. “All these nights trying for a baby. Were you thinking of her, instead of—” But I gasped over my own words, unable to say the word me. I couldn’t bear to attach this travesty to us, to my marriage.

Before he could answer, the nausea pressed upward, relentless, and I made a run for the toilet, slamming the bathroom door behind me and locking it. I heaved five, seven, ten times, until there remained nothing left inside of me.

The roar of a boat engine nearby on the river jolted me out of the memory. I looked up to find Bachelor Alf watching me, his hands spread open. “Are you ready?” he asked.

Embarrassed, I nodded and followed him to a group of five or six others. A few of them knelt among the rocks, sifting through pebbles. I stepped closer to my guide and spoke in a hushed voice. “I’m sorry, but I don’t entirely understand what mudlarking is. Are we searching for something?”