I should have walked away.

I know that now. I knew it then, too. I should have gotten back in my car and called Claire and asked her for an explanation, like a normal person.

Instead, I followed a total stranger through his blue front door.

His house was neat and quiet. Wooden floors. A big gray couch. A bookshelf full of business books and a few thrillers. A framed photo on the wall of an older woman in a flowered dress, standing in a garden, squinting into the sun.

It smelled a little like coffee. And something else.

It took me a second to place it.

Claire’s perfume. The one with the vanilla in it. Very faint, like it was soaked into the couch cushions.

My stomach turned over.

Adrian went into the kitchen and came back with two glasses of water. He set one down in front of me at the small dining table.

I picked it up. My hand was shaking so badly that the water sloshed over the rim. I set it back down. I couldn’t drink it.

He sat down across from me. He put his hands flat on the table, like he was trying to hold himself steady.

“How do you know Claire?” I asked.

He took a breath.

“I’m her boss,” he said.

“Her boss?”

“I manage the marketing team she works on. At Brightline. I’ve been her supervisor for about a year and a half.”

I sat there trying to remember.

Claire worked in marketing for a mid-sized company downtown that did advertising for car dealerships and furniture stores. I knew that much. I knew she had deadlines. I knew there were difficult clients, because sometimes she came home and dropped her bag on the floor and said, “If I ever have to write the words Labor Day Mega Sale again, I’m going to walk into the ocean.”

But she almost never used names.

Early on, when we first moved in together, I used to ask her about work every night at dinner. Who she’d talked to. What happened. She told me, very gently, that it drained her.

“I talk about it all day, Ben,” she said. “When I come home, I just want to be home. Can we keep the office at the office?”

It made sense. Lots of people are like that. My dad was like that. He worked at a factory for thirty years and never once talked about it at the dinner table.

So I stopped asking.

I’d never met Adrian. I’d never even heard his name.

“We’ve been dating,” Adrian said.

He said it carefully, like he was walking across ice.

I stared at him.

“You’re telling me,” I said slowly, “that you’ve been dating my wife.”

He flinched at the word wife. Like it physically hurt him.

“I thought she was single,” he said. “I swear to God. She told me she’d just gotten out of a long relationship before we started seeing each other. She said it ended badly. She didn’t like talking about it.”

“How long?” I said. “How long have you been together?”

His eyes dropped to the table.

“Eight months,” he said.

I gripped my glass so hard I thought it might break.

“No,” I said.

“I’m sorry.”

“No. She’s been married to me for three years. We’ve been together for seven. We have a house. We have a mortgage.”

Adrian pressed both hands against his face. He sat like that for a long time, with his elbows on the table and his face in his hands.

When he finally took them away, his eyes were red.

“We were talking about living together,” he said.

I stood up so fast my chair scraped across his wooden floor with a horrible sound.

I didn’t know where I was going. I just couldn’t sit there anymore. I walked to the window and looked out at his front yard, at the grocery bag still lying on the driveway with the bread tipped over.

Adrian didn’t try to stop me. He didn’t stand up. He just stayed at the table.

“I can show you,” he said quietly. “I know you have no reason to believe me. I wouldn’t believe me either.”

I turned around.

I prayed, right then, as hard as I’ve ever prayed for anything. I prayed that he was lying. That he was some kind of creep. Some guy who was obsessed with my wife and made a pillow out of a photo he’d edited on his computer. Anything.

He picked up his phone and opened his photo gallery.

He slid it across the table toward me.

The first photograph showed Claire laughing beside a lake.

The wind was blowing her hair across her face. She was wearing a gray sweater I didn’t recognize. Behind her, the water was dark blue, and there were trees all around it, turning orange and red. She had one hand up, trying to push her hair out of her eyes, and she was laughing at whoever was holding the camera.

I knew that laugh. I knew exactly what it sounded like.

I swiped.

The next photo showed her holding a glass of red wine, standing on the porch of a log cabin. She was wrapped in a plaid blanket. She was smiling.

I swiped again.

Adrian, kissing her forehead. Her eyes closed. The green jacket. The silver necklace.

The pillow photograph.