I contacted her anyway. Rosalind had told me not to. I did it because I was tired of learning about my own life secondhand, and because the word finally had been sitting in my chest for three weeks, growing heavier every day.

We met at a café near the ferry terminal. Camille arrived with her son in a stroller, looking exhausted rather than triumphant. She had not known I existed until October. Julian had told her he was separated, that the paperwork was underway, and that he was staying in the guest room to keep things civil.

He had shown her a photograph of our house and called it the property being divided. The jewelry was supposedly a birthday gift. The hotel was the night she discovered her ex was seeking full custody, and Julian had driven two hours to sit with her. She had believed she was being rescued by a free man.

Then she told me something I never expected. She had known about me since the mall. She ended things that same afternoon, told Julian to go home to his wife, and blocked him. He had spent three weeks letting me believe she was still an ongoing problem, because a man in the middle of a crisis gets managed, while a man who has simply been caught gets judged.

I did not divorce him. I want to be honest about that because people expect a different ending. We went to counseling for fourteen months. He did the work, mostly. He is kinder now, quieter, and strangely eager to tell the truth about ordinary things.

But something never came back. I check things now: receipts, timestamps, the odometer. Not because I suspect him, but because I no longer know how to stop. Trust, once broken, leaves habits behind.

Camille remarried last spring. Rosalind and I have lunch every Thursday and have become closer than I ever was with my own mother. Some nights, I sit at the kitchen counter with the laptop closed before me and wonder whether staying was love or simply the enormous weight of thirteen years. I still do not know. The folder remains on my desktop. I have never opened it again, and I have never deleted it either.