Claire’s apartment smelled like oranges and floor polish, not sin. My husband’s smile watched us from a silver frame on her shelf, his arm draped around her shoulders in that easy way I’d once believed belonged to me alone. Four years, she said, fingers strangling a dish towel. Four years of hotel keys, hushed phone calls, and an apartment he’d promised was “an investment.” He’d bought our someday in Paris and quietly deeded it into her name when the cardiologist’s face turned serious. In his cufflink box, tucked beneath the ones I’d given him for our twentieth anniversary, the letter lay folded and thin with handling: he was leaving her, he swore, coming clean to me, inviting me here as his wife, not his alibi. The heart attack on our driveway froze him between intentions, trapping Claire and me on opposite sides of a lie neither of us had been allowed to ch… Continues…
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