"Colin called it my hobby because I rarely made as much as he did. He liked the part where it sounded interesting at parties. He never liked the part where I had to work Saturdays."
I told her about Malik and the company, how we had nearly gone out of business after a city contract was delayed, and how the first time we paid all our employees on a Friday without needing to check the balance afterward had felt better than any award we'd won. Nora laughed at that. She said the first time she paid the rent on her shop three months in advance, she had bought a cake and eaten it sitting on the floor behind the counter.
It was an hour before either of us mentioned our spouses. Nora took a breath and said Colin had been staying with his brother in Bucks County. He had called Oliver twice, texted Nora constantly, and sent an email describing what happened as a lapse in judgment that had been magnified by the surprise of being discovered. He wanted to know whether they could begin marriage counseling immediately, preferably before either of them told their families.
"He calls it one mistake," Nora said. "But I found the receipts for other hotels when I finally stopped being afraid to look at our shared credit-card statements. I didn't hack anything."
"The statements were in the folder we use to pay taxes. February. March. April. Different places, same pattern."
I stared at my coffee. Sabrina had said July. If Nora was right, my wife had not simply lied about the affair; she had lied about when the lying began. The months reached back through my birthday, through a snowstorm when I had driven across town to pick her up because she said her car wouldn't start, through a weekend I'd spent painting the nursery in Tessa's house while Sabrina told me she was buried in an urgent proposal.
"Are you sure the hotel expenses were his?" I asked, because certainty still seemed like something that needed protecting.
"I'm sure about the dates, the charges, and his name on the confirmations I found. I'm not claiming to know what happened at every one. I don't want to become the kind of person who invents what she can't prove." Her fingers tightened around the mug.
"But I asked him. He didn't deny they were connected to Sabrina. He said the dates weren't important."
I took a slow breath. "The dates seem important to me."
"To me, too."
She told me the hardest part was not imagining Colin in different rooms. It was thinking about how often he had come home afterward and sat beside Oliver while they worked on science projects, how easily he had asked what was for dinner, how he had still complained when she forgot to pick up his dry cleaning. He had not been living some separate glamorous life, she realized. He had been bringing his secrets into the ordinary rooms where she was trying to raise their son.