The ugliest part wasn't the information itself. It was how quickly she became impatient with the fact that I was hurt. I was standing in the kitchen with the evidence of her affair between us, trying to understand whether my marriage had been real that morning, and she wanted to move the conversation along. She crossed her arms and said we were adults who shouldn't turn one bad decision into a permanent disaster. Then she spoke the sentence I would hear in my memory many times afterward.
"It's just one night, Mike. Don't turn it into a tragedy." I looked toward the coffee maker because looking at her had become difficult.
The lopsided blue flowers on the orange mug were exactly where they'd been that morning. I understood, with a clarity that felt almost cold, that whatever apology she might eventually offer would have to travel through the attitude she'd just shown me. At that moment, her biggest problem was not what she'd done to me. It was that I wasn't cooperating with her preferred version of the evening.
"Okay," I said. Kate watched me walk toward the hallway, and I heard her ask what that was supposed to mean. I told her it meant I needed time. She called after me that she was willing to talk when I was ready to be reasonable, a sentence I carried with me into the bedroom without answering. I closed the door, sat on the edge of the bed, and waited for my hands to stop shaking before opening my laptop.
I started with the joint checking account. There was no genius in that choice; it was simply the first record I knew how to retrieve. I downloaded two years of statements, then the mortgage statements and the property tax records. My breathing gradually settled into the rhythm it took on at work when a delivery schedule failed and I had to reconstruct the sequence of events. The comfort I found in those numbers disturbed me later, but that night it gave me something firm to hold.
I located the original bank transfer from the year we'd purchased the house. It took longer than it should have because the bank had changed its online portal twice, and the old confirmation was stored in a folder with a name I'd forgotten. There it was, though: forty-three thousand dollars, the date, the receiving account, and my own plain notation identifying the payment as my contribution toward the down payment at our address. I saved another copy and printed it using the small printer we kept for shipping labels and tax forms. The paper came out slightly crooked, and I straightened it with both hands as though that mattered.
Then I opened a new spreadsheet and created categories for the documents. Account statements. Property purchase. Household expenses. Correspondence.