He had stood on this driveway and looked at what he was building and carried the whole of it alone, and I had been living our ordinary life two hours south, marking midterm papers and buying groceries and falling asleep on his side of the bed because his pillow still smelled like him, and I had not known.
I had not known any of this existed.
The anger came first, quick and hot, the way it always comes when love and betrayal arrive together. I pressed my fingers against the steering wheel and breathed through it.
Then I got out of the car.
The driveway gravel shifted under my shoes as I walked toward the house, and the sound of it was the only evidence that I was moving. Everything else felt suspended, the way air feels before a storm, charged with potential, holding its breath.
