She stared at her hands. "It started as coffee after class. He asked what I was studying. I was tutoring a GED cohort on Tuesday nights—remember? You said it was good I had something that was mine. Franklin was in the building for a warehouse safety certification that ran in the next room. We talked in the hallway like people who were just being polite. Then we talked in the parking lot. Then we talked on a bench outside when the building closed and neither of us wanted to go home to an empty quiet."
Reggie's jaw ached from clenching. "You told me those Tuesday nights ran late because of lesson plans."
"Some of them did. Then some of them didn't. I got good at the split. That's the part I hate saying out loud. I got good at it."
"You were never home," she said, and then she put both hands over her face as if she could push the sentence back in. "That isn't an excuse. I know it isn't. I'm saying it because it's part of how it happened, not because it makes me right."
Reggie laughed once without humor. "Summit asked me to cover nights. You told me to take them. You said the overtime would help with the roof next spring."
"I did."
"So which is it? I was never home, or you sent me out so you could have the house?"
Sondra's hands dropped. Her eyes were red. "Both. That's the ugly part. Both can be true."
He walked into the kitchen because standing in front of her made his hands feel too empty. He filled a glass, drank half of it, set it down. The fridge hummed. On the side of it, held by a magnet shaped like a tiny house, was a photo from two summers ago: Reggie, Sondra, Scout at the lake, all of them squinting into sun like people who had not yet learned the price of squinting.
"Did you love him," Reggie asked the counter.
Silence stretched. Then: "I don't know. I loved how he looked at me when I talked. I loved not being the woman waiting for a text that said you'd be late again. I loved feeling chosen in a room that wasn't waiting for someone else to walk through the door."
"And me?"
"You're my husband." The word landed soft and heavy. "You're the person I built this life with. You're the person I still—Reggie, I still care. That doesn't make this less of a betrayal. It just makes it messier."
He turned. She was standing now in the kitchen doorway, arms wrapped around herself, braids falling forward like a curtain she could hide behind if she needed to.
"Evelyn Stokes asked me if my brother had left," he said. "She thought he was family. She waved at him from the mailbox."
Sondra's mouth opened. No sound came out.
"She looked embarrassed when I told her I don't have a brother," Reggie continued. "Like she'd walked into something private. She had. She just didn't know how private."