An unknown number that appeared and disappeared on Luca’s phone.

Messages deleted before she could read them.

The small, accumulating evidence of a life being lived somewhere she was not invited.

And then the sentence she had repeated twice, as if repetition could make it true: “After thirty years of marriage, you don’t throw away an entire life for an affair.”

I had reassured her.

That is the thing I have had to live with.

I had told her, gently, that she was probably imagining it, that Luca adored her, that thirty years does not evaporate.