The calls that ended suddenly. The holidays he said he could not get leave for. The time I asked about video calling, and he said the bandwidth on the platform was too limited for consistent video.

The Christmas he sent a gift card instead of a package because he said shipping from Norway was too expensive and too slow.

I had believed every single one of those things.

Not because I was stupid, but because I trusted him.

Because when you love someone, you extend them the courtesy of your faith.

But now, I was sitting on a kitchen floor in the dark, and I was thinking about Diane’s face in the hallway.

That expression people get when they realize they’ve just told you something you were not supposed to know.

I got up, opened my laptop, and started thinking clearly for the first time in 4 years.

The first thing I did was look at our joint bank account.

I had access. I always had, but I never scrutinized it the way I did that night.

His deposits had been regular until 14 months ago.

Around that time, they slowed to every 6 weeks, then every 2 months.

The most recent deposit had come in 3 months ago.

The account had a balance that showed I had spent very little of what he sent because my nursing salary covered most of my expenses, and I had been saving his contributions for the house we were supposed to buy together.

Then I went to his name online.

He was not easy to find.

He had no personal social media that I had ever known about, or so I thought.

But when I searched more carefully, combining his name with the city, I found a photo on a local community event page. A neighborhood block party on the east side of the city.

Dated 8 months ago.

He was standing next to a woman.

She was laughing, one hand raised as if she had just said something funny.

He was smiling in a way I had not seen in photographs in years.

They were not touching, but they were close.

The kind of clothes that does not happen between strangers.

Her name was tagged in the post.

I stared at it for a long time.

Her name was Megan.

I did not sleep.

I worked a morning shift the next day on 4 hours of rest and kept my face completely neutral for 12 hours.

I have gotten good at that.

Working in a hospital, you learn to manage what you show.

That evening, I went back to the community event page and found more.

Megan had a public profile on a neighborhood app, one of those platforms where local residents post about lost pets and yard sales and street closures.

She had been posting from an address in the Harrove area, which was the exact area Diane’s brother-in-law had mentioned for over a year.

I found a photo she had posted of a meal she described as a home-cooked dinner.

In the background, slightly out of focus, was a bookshelf.

On the top shelf, I could see two framed photos.

I zoomed in as far as the resolution would allow.

One of the frames held a photo I recognized.

It was taken at my in-laws house four Christmases ago.