A flicker of fear, then instant, molten anger. "Out with friends. Do I need to report my movements to you now, Warden?"
"You were at the Laurier."
She blinked. Then her eyes darted to the table, seeing the matchbook. Her face hardened into something ugly and triumphant. The mask clicked into place. "So? It's a public bar."
"You said you were working late tonight. You texted: Heads down on the quarterly reports. Don't wait up."
"I didn't want you to worry," she shot back, but it was a perfunctory lie. She was already moving past it toward the fight she wanted.
She strode to the kitchen, poured two fingers of my best scotch—a statement—and turned to face me. "What do you want me to say, James? That I needed to be somewhere I wasn't being micromanaged? Somewhere people actually know how to have fun?"
And so it began: the redirect, the blame. It was my fault for working too much, my fault for being emotionally unavailable, my fault for being a safe, predictable bet that had become a prison sentence. Each barb was designed to wound, to provoke the reaction that would justify her next move.
I let her talk. I absorbed it. The calm inside me grew colder, clearer.
Finally, I asked the simple, direct question, the one she'd been dancing around: "Sarah, are you seeing someone else?"
She slammed the glass down. "You want the truth? The raw, unfiltered truth you're always begging for? Fine. Mark is everything you're not. He's spontaneous. He's exciting. He sees me. He wants me. You just maintain me, like a fucking project on your to-do list. A houseplant you water out of obligation."
The words were meant to eviscerate, and they did. But they also cut through the last of the fog. This wasn't a stumble; this was a choice, a demolition.
I looked at her, this stranger in my wife's skin, her chest heaving with manufactured passion. "Are you saying you're having an affair?" I asked, my voice flat—a clinical question.
That's when the snort came. The eye roll. The final, glorious overplay of her hand. She leaned back, swirling the amber liquid—a queen dismissing a peasant.