Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t recognize you from the photo on his desk —”
The photo on his desk.
Even mid-panic, that small phrase landed somewhere soft in me.
My husband kept a photo of me on the desk in his home office — the office where all of this had been happening — close enough that a notary who visited on Thursday afternoons had seen my face enough times to feel she should have known it.
It was not the sort of detail a man arranges for a mistress’s benefit.
It was the sort of detail that is simply, quietly true of a marriage, sitting there in a frame the whole time, waiting to mean something.