She sits there and cries, and then she wipes her face, changes her shirt, and comes inside smiling.”

Chapter 3 — The Worst Conclusion

The mug slipped and hit the counter with a heavy crack.

Coffee went everywhere.

My brain — the brain of a software engineer, trained to chase the cleanest explanation — skipped past every reasonable one and sprinted straight to the worst: my wife was having an affair.

Bethany is an ICU nurse at Havenbrook General.

She works twelve-hour shifts, hard and relentless.

We had been married eleven years, and I had believed, without ever questioning it, that we were happy.

And now my nine-year-old was describing a secret ritual happening every single day in our own driveway.

“Thanks for telling me, Colm,” I managed, reaching for paper towels.

“I’ll check on it.”

I have spent my career finding the bug in the system — the one line, out of thousands, where the logic breaks.

It is a useful way to think about code.

It is a catastrophic way to think about a marriage.