My husband’s truck has one of those insurance apps that scores your driving, and it’s under my login because I set it up to get the discount. We’re outside Tulsa, Oklahoma. He’s been leaving at eight-thirty three nights a week since February, helping a buddy get a boat ready. I trusted him because after his surgery in 2021 he cried and told me he’d never lied to me about anything, and I believed him. In March I opened the app to dispute a hard-braking event on my own car and scrolled through his trips. Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, the same route, ending at the same pin. It wasn’t a marina, and there wasn’t any water within nine miles.
It was an apartment complex off 51st. He stayed there an average of two hours and eleven minutes every time. I sat in the parking lot one Thursday, which my daughter says was a stupid thing to do alone, and watched him carry a car seat out of the truck. A woman came down to meet him holding a baby, and she had a phone in her other hand. My phone buzzed at the exact second she looked at hers. She’d accidentally sent something to the family group text, and I saw the first line before she deleted it. It said, “He’ll be here tonight like always.”
I didn’t confront him that night. I waited until Saturday and asked him who the baby belonged to. He looked at me and said, “What baby?” I told him I’d seen the car seat. He said it was for his friend’s boat, which didn’t even make sense anymore. Then I showed him the trip history. He stopped talking. I asked him who lived at the apartment, and he finally said it was a woman he’d known before we met. I asked why he’d been going there for months. He said she’d had nowhere else to go. Then my daughter walked into the room, looked at the address on my phone, and said, “Mom, that’s the apartment Dad rented for me when I was pregnant.”
