She called her mother from the driveway and asked her to come outside. I was still upstairs when I heard my wife say, “What did you find?” Then there was silence. My daughter had found a hotel key card sewn into the lining of the suitcase—with a handwritten date and an apartment number on the back.
My wife came upstairs carrying the suitcase. She didn’t ask whose it was. She asked me why our daughter had found a second phone number hidden beneath the lining. I tried to explain that it was an old contact from work. My daughter immediately said, “Then why did you panic when I said I’d call it?”
She called anyway. A woman answered. My wife stood completely still while my daughter asked whether she’d known me for a long time. The woman recognized my name and went quiet. Then she said something that made my wife sit down: “I thought he told you years ago.”
The woman didn’t know my wife was listening. She told my daughter she’d been seeing me since 2009 and had believed I was separated. My wife didn’t cry. She simply opened the suitcase, took out the little bottle of aspirin she’d packed for me for sixteen years, and put it on the table. Then she looked at me and said, “I spent sixteen years making sure you had everything you needed to leave me.”
