The deputy called me back that afternoon and said the registration was clean, but the insurance record had been changed in 2021. He gave me the woman’s name and I knew it immediately because she’d been on the church mailing list for years, although I had never spoken to her. I asked him if the car had been reported anywhere else, and he said there was something strange in the state database. The same woman had been listed as the registered owner of another vehicle that had been parked at our house before, and that vehicle was tied to an address across town. I drove past it that evening, but I didn’t stop because there was a child’s bicycle in the yard and I suddenly wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
Instead I went home and opened the thermostat history again. I went back month by month, all the way to 2021, and the pattern was there the whole time. Every Tuesday and Thursday, the system showed someone arriving shortly after nine and leaving between one and two. I checked our church calendar because I thought maybe my husband had been bringing someone over for some kind of ministry work, but there was nothing. Then I noticed something I’d never paid attention to before: on the days she came, our bedroom temperature was always changed manually, even though I never touched the thermostat and my husband always told me he left the house straight from work.
That night I waited until he came home and asked him who the woman was. He didn’t ask which woman. He just stood there with his keys in his hand and said, “How long have you known?” I told him I’d only known since that morning, and he sat down at the kitchen table like his legs had stopped working. He said she wasn’t his girlfriend and that he hadn’t been meeting her behind my back for the reason I thought. Then he reached into his wallet and pulled out a photograph I’d never seen before. It was our house, taken from across the street in 2021, and standing beside him was the same woman from the car. On the back, in my husband’s handwriting, were four words: “The day she came home.”
