It is one thing to imagine a single betrayal.
It is another to imagine an infrastructure — a repeated, managed, normalized thing, with my own child folded into it as a small quiet accomplice, trading his silence for stickers.
In four seconds I had gone from a happy wife to a woman revising her entire marriage backward, re-reading every Thursday, every time Wade had said he was working from home, every ordinary evening, looking for the seams.
That is what suspicion does.
It doesn’t just poison the present.
It reaches back and poisons the whole archive, so that even the good memories become suspect, become possible cover stories, become evidence.