“The woman whose house you’ve been letting yourself into while I’m at work.”
I heard myself say it and some distant part of me winced at the volume, at the venom, at the ten shoppers now pretending not to listen.
This was not a thing I did.
I am not a woman who makes scenes in grocery stores; I am the woman who returns the wrong change and apologizes for the inconvenience of being right.
But the person saying these words to a stranger by the bakery case was someone else, someone the last ninety seconds had made — a wife with a wound so fresh and so raw that dignity had stopped being available to her.
That is what the fear of betrayal does to a person.