My husband started calling it “the situation.” Never cancer, never once. I thought it was his way of coping, and when my daughter asked why he wouldn’t say the word, I told her men of his generation were just different. Then I found a parking receipt from a hospital in another county, dated on a day when he’d told me he was working late. It wasn’t his hospital, and it wasn’t mine.
I looked up the address that night and found a medical center with a department I had never expected to see connected to my husband. I didn’t confront him immediately because I wanted to know whether the receipt was a mistake. Instead, I checked the date again, then searched through the glove compartment and found two more receipts from the same place. The strangest part was that each one was from a different day when he had given me a completely different explanation.
I finally asked him where he’d been that afternoon, and he gave me the same answer without hesitating. Then I put the receipt on the table and watched his face change. He didn’t ask where I’d found it or accuse me of going through his things; he just sat down and said, “You weren’t supposed to find out this way.” And when he finally told me what “the situation” actually meant, I realized he hadn’t been hiding a diagnosis from me… he’d been hiding someone else.
