Let me tell you a little about Claire and me, so you understand why I did something so crazy.

My name is Ben Holloway. I’m thirty-two. I’m a physical therapist. I spend most of my days helping people learn to walk again after knee surgeries and car accidents and strokes. It’s slow work. You celebrate small things. A step. A stair. A day without pain.

I met Claire when we were both twenty-five, at a friend’s backyard barbecue. She was standing by the cooler arguing with someone about whether a hot dog counts as a sandwich. She was very passionate about it. She said it was a taco. I told her that was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. She told me I clearly didn’t understand bread.

We argued about it for an hour.

At the end of the night, she wrote her phone number on a paper plate and handed it to me.

“Call me when you’re ready to admit I’m right,” she said.

I called her the next day. I never admitted she was right.

We dated for two years before we moved in together, into a small apartment above a bakery. Every morning smelled like cinnamon rolls. We gained about ten pounds each that first year.

Three years ago, we got married, in her parents’ backyard, under a big oak tree, with sixty people and a taco truck. That was her idea. “Because hot dogs are tacos,” she said in her vows. Everybody laughed. Her dad laughed so hard he had to sit down.

After the wedding, we bought a house in the suburbs. Three bedrooms, a small yard, a kitchen with ugly yellow tile we kept saying we’d replace.

We had a shared grocery list stuck to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a pineapple. We had a Sunday routine. Pancakes, then the farmer’s market, then a nap. We had an ongoing argument about who kept leaving coffee grounds in the coffee machine. It was Claire. It was always Claire. She denied it every single time.

I thought we were happy.

I really did.

I followed the gray SUV off the highway at the next exit.

I stayed two cars back, like I’d seen in movies, and felt stupid doing it. It went through a few ordinary streets. Past a gas station, a strip mall, a Dunkin’ Donuts. Into a neighborhood of small brick houses with neat little lawns and pumpkins on the porches.

The whole time, I kept telling myself I was being ridiculous.

It’s a coincidence. Lots of women have green jackets. Lots of women have silver necklaces. You couldn’t even see her face that clearly. Turn around. Go home. Make dinner.

But I didn’t turn around.

The neighborhood was fifteen minutes from our house. Fifteen minutes. I’d driven past it a hundred times on the way to the hardware store.

The SUV slowed down. Its blinker came on.

It pulled into the driveway of a small brick house with a blue door and a basketball hoop over the garage.

I pulled over across the street and turned off my engine.