I stood there long enough that she finally stepped outside and closed the door behind her. I asked her how long she’d been married to my husband, and she said twenty-one years. I told her we’d been married twenty-six, and she looked at me like I’d said something impossible. Then she asked me what his full name was, and when I told her, she went inside and came back with a framed photograph from the hallway. It was my husband, younger than I’d ever seen him, standing beside her with his arm around her, and there were two children in front of them. The photograph was dated 2004.
I asked her why she thought I was his sister, and she said because that’s what he’d told her when he first started visiting her family. She said he’d been coming to that house since before they were married, usually on Saturdays, and that he’d always told her his work required him to travel. I told her he drives locally and has for years, and she started crying. Then she said something that made me stop breathing for a second: she’d never questioned why he kept a room in their house for himself, because he told her it was where he slept whenever he came to visit. She said he still had clothes in that room.
I went back to my car and opened Life360 again, this time looking at every saved place instead of just the location history. There were three addresses I’d never seen, all marked with the same little house icon, and two of them had been saved under names that meant nothing to me. I opened the oldest one, and the visit history went back to 2020. Then I opened the newest address, and there were only six visits, all within the last three months. The last one was yesterday. I zoomed in on the map and realized it wasn’t a house at all. It was the courthouse where my husband had filed something under my name.
