Those two weeks were the strangest of my marriage.

I lay beside a sleeping man I had loved for seven years and feel the specific vertigo of realizing I no longer knew him — that the person I’d built a life around had a whole second life I’d been financing without knowing it, jewelry on some other woman, or possibly no woman at all, possibly just the pure pleasure of spending money that wasn’t quite his.

I kept looking for the innocent explanation.

I am not a suspicious person by nature; I had to teach myself, over those fourteen days, to stop supplying his defense for him, to stop the reflex that had run my whole marriage — the one that heard a lie and immediately built a charitable reason it might be true.