“It’s not what you think,” he said, lowering his voice. “I found the first strand last week, and I’ve been trying to figure out what to do without scaring you.” He pulled out his phone and showed me a photo he’d taken days earlier, another length of the same dark hair, coiled inside the exhaust pipe. My stomach twisted. “I didn’t tell you,” he said, “because I didn’t want you to panic before I understood it. But someone has been getting to our car, at night, in the driveway. And it isn’t a woman I’m seeing. It’s the opposite of that.”

He turned the phone and showed me one more thing. A grainy still from the doorbell camera, timestamped 2:40 in the morning. A figure crouched behind his car. Not a lover leaving in a hurry. A stranger, hooded, deliberately stuffing something into the tailpipe. My hands went cold around the paper towel. The late nights, the garage phone call, the four missing hours on Saturday, none of it was an affair. My husband hadn’t been hiding another woman. He had been hiding that we were being watched, and that he was terrified.