I asked what she did. He said she consulted for one of their vendors. I asked why he hadn’t mentioned meeting her. He said it wasn’t dinner. I asked what it was. He said a meeting.
“At 10:47 p.m.,” I said.
“We finished late. That’s all there is to it.”
I looked back at the car. The red bra on the wiper. The black one on the driver’s mirror. A dozen other pieces arranged across the hood.
“Why would somebody cover your car in lingerie because you hugged a coworker?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s becoming your favorite sentence.”
We went inside. And the silence inside the house was worse than the street had been, because inside there was no performance of normalcy to maintain. Just the kitchen tiles we’d picked out together and the mortgage we complained about and eleven years of a marriage I had believed in completely until about fifteen minutes ago.
