She said, “You left this in the wallet again,” and placed it on the table between us. I knew immediately what she meant, because there was only one thing in that wallet I had spent thirty-one years making sure she never saw. She had taken it to the leather shop herself, and the craftsman had removed every card and piece of paper before repairing the lining. My wife had seen the photograph. She didn’t ask who the woman was because she already knew her name.
I told her nothing had ever happened between us, the same excuse I’d used for decades. My wife looked at me and said that wasn’t the question anymore. She wanted to know why I had kept another woman’s photograph against my body for thirty-one years while telling her she was the only person I wanted. I couldn’t explain why I’d kept it, because the truth was uglier than an affair. I had never touched that woman, but I had spent our entire marriage preserving a private attachment to someone my wife didn’t even know I still thought about.
Then my wife turned the photograph over. There was a date written on the back, and beneath it was a sentence in my handwriting. She read it aloud and asked why I’d written it if the photograph meant nothing. I finally admitted that I’d written it the night before our wedding, after seeing the woman one last time. My wife sat down and said, “So you didn’t accidentally keep it for thirty-one years. You chose to keep it every single morning you put that wallet in your pocket.”
She handed the photograph back to me, but I couldn’t take it. She told me she wasn’t angry because I had loved someone before her. She was angry because for thirty-one years she’d believed she was building a life with a man who had left the past behind. “You didn’t cheat on me with her,” she said. “You cheated me out of being married to someone who was actually here.” Then she put the photograph in the trash, picked up her coat, and left me sitting at the kitchen table with the wallet she’d repaired for my birthday.
