I was not planning an ambush and did not yet know which records a lawyer might find useful. I wanted to be certain that whatever happened, I would not have to rely solely on an argument between two people who now remembered the same life differently.
Through the wall I could hear the television turn on. Kate had chosen a comedy we'd watched together before, one with a laugh track that played at regular intervals. I sat staring at the spreadsheet while strangers laughed in our living room. At some point she came to the bedroom door and knocked twice. When I told her she could come in, she opened it just wide enough to look at me.
"Do you want to talk now?" she asked. I said I didn't think there was anything productive to say that night. She glanced at the laptop and asked whether I was catching up on work, and I told her I was getting things organized. The answer was true, and apparently ordinary enough to satisfy her. "Well, don't stay up all night punishing yourself," she said, then closed the door.
That phrase stayed with me. She had taken an injury she'd caused and described my reaction as something I was doing to myself. I could see how convenient that would become if I allowed it. Every expression of pain could be recast as a decision to suffer, and every request for the truth could become a refusal to move forward. I made another folder on the laptop, this one for notes about our conversations, and wrote down her exact words while I still remembered them.
At one in the morning I finally closed the computer. I lay beside the spot where she normally slept and stared toward the hall, aware that she was probably asleep on the couch. I had imagined, during the first hour after discovering the affair, that I'd cry or feel physically sick. Instead I lay awake thinking about how to tell my brother, whether the mortgage had any clauses I should worry about, and whether keeping a photograph of an already visible message was the wrong thing to do. Every practical question seemed easier to approach than the one underneath them: how could she have looked at me all those ordinary mornings and carried this secret without showing it?
Daniel answered his phone before seven the next morning. He was four years older than me and ran a small property management company with a handful of employees and an endless supply of stories about clogged drains, late rent, and tenants who believed maintenance crews could fix anything with the right wrench. Growing up, he'd always been the brother who checked whether the spare tire had air before a road trip, while I was the one who remembered everyone's snacks. We didn't often have long emotional conversations. When something went wrong, Daniel tended to make coffee and look for a useful next step.