She wasn’t hiding it.

You just thought the shop was where she worked.

It was where she lived.” I made the tea.

Two people came in that I’d never met, and they wept when they saw it was me and not her, and then they sat in the green chair and told me stories about my own wife that I had never heard, and I understood that I had been married for forty-one years to a woman whose real life had been happening two miles from my recliner, in plain sight, and that she had been not a seamstress but a kind of quiet doctor for an entire street, and nobody had thought to tell the husband because they all assumed the husband knew.

I want to be careful how I say this, because it would be easy to make it sound like a betrayal, and it was the opposite of one.