The girls followed.

I had raised all five alone, on a soldier’s salary, moving them across three postings and an ocean, and he had not known any of them existed because he had never asked a single question that might have troubled the story he found easier to believe.

“The affair,” he said, hoarse.

“The evidence—” “There was no affair, Rhett.

There was never an affair.” And I told him the shape of the lie, because he had a right to it now even though he had forfeited the right ten years ago by not wanting it: that the night I was supposedly in a hotel in Atlanta with his rival, I had been eighty miles away at a logistics seminar in Augusta, checked into military lodging under my commander’s orders, a fact that a single phone call could have confirmed and that he had never made.

That the hotel record with my name on it had been arranged.