I got a text from a number I didn’t know that just said, “Are you the wife?” We’re outside Ottumwa, Iowa. I’m sixty-two and married thirty-four years, and I threw the phone across the room. I trusted him because he’s been on the same route for the same company for nineteen years and comes home smelling like diesel every single day. I wrote back and asked who this was, and she said she’d rather show me than tell me. She sent four screenshots. They were from a texting app I’d never heard of, the account name was his, and the picture was one I took of him at Table Rock in 2022.
The messages weren’t about love. They were about money. He’d been sending her four hundred dollars a month since 2023, and she’d been sending him something back, but it wasn’t money. It was photographs of a house. Our house. The driveway, the back door, my car. She’d been taking pictures of my house and sending them to my husband, and he’d been paying her to do it. I asked her why, and she said, “Because he told me you’d taken his kids and he needed proof of what you were doing.” He has no kids. We have no kids. Then she asked me whether I was the one who had been coming home late on Wednesdays.
I told her I wasn’t, and asked what she meant. She sent me a photograph taken through our kitchen window three nights earlier. I was sitting at the table in it, but I hadn’t been home that night. Then she sent another picture, this one of the same kitchen from inside the house. There was a man standing beside my refrigerator with his back to the camera. She said she’d never taken that picture and didn’t know who sent it to her. I called my husband and asked where he was. He said he was still at work. I looked at the photograph again and noticed something on the counter behind him. It was the spare key to our house that I’d lost in 2021 — and I suddenly remembered who I’d given it to.
