Loretta and I have been friends since our kids were in Sunday school together in Springfield. Thirty-some years of carpools, church bake sales, and sitting on each other’s back porches while our husbands talked about lawnmowers and high school football. I know how she takes her coffee, two spoons of sugar and a splash of cream, and I know she trusts Gene like sunrise. Or she did. Until Thursday afternoon when we were sitting at her kitchen table splitting a Kroger cinnamon coffee cake and his phone lit up face-up between us.

The preview said, “Can’t wait for this weekend. Just us. No excuses this time. 😘” It wasn’t from a coworker. It was from a name saved as “Dentist.” Loretta read it, then read it again, then very quietly turned the phone back over.

We were just sitting there. Gene was out in the garage with the little red radio playing classic rock. His phone was face-up by the sugar bowl. He never leaves it anywhere. That is the first thing I thought later on, that he must have slipped up because he was too comfortable after twenty-seven years.

It buzzed again and the screen lit up. I wasn’t trying to read it. It was just there in my line of sight.

Loretta’s hand stopped dead with the butter knife still resting in the crumbly cinnamon streusel. She read the words, leaned in closer, and read them a second time, moving her lips a little bit the way she always does when she is reading fine print on a rebate form.

Then she turned the phone back over. She did it so gentle, like it was hot enough to burn her fingers.

I said her name. I just whispered, “Loretta.”

She didn’t look at me. She said, “Don’t. He’ll hear.” Her voice was calm as anything. Too calm.

Gene has a fishing trip every single August up at Table Rock Lake with two of his buddies from the hardware store. It is a tradition older than most of the furniture in their living room. That weekend was nine days away. Loretta had been packing his red plastic cooler for that exact trip for twenty years, freezing pork chops and packing extra coffee filters.

She stood up from the table, rinsed her ceramic cup in the sink, and just stood there for a long time with her back to me. Her shoulders were stiff under her yellow cotton blouse. When she finally turned around, her eyes were completely dry and her jaw was set in a way I hadn’t seen since her mother’s funeral down in Greenville.

She looked right at me and said, “The dentist is a man. Dr. Feldman. Gene had a crown put in back in March.”

So “Dentist” wasn’t the dentist.

She walked over to the counter and picked up her own phone. She didn’t call out to Gene. She didn’t storm out to the garage and throw a wrench at him. She just unlocked her screen, opened her banking app, and started scrolling through the last sixty days of transactions like she was balancing the church tithe ledger.

There was a charge for a jewelry store down in Branson. There was a charge for a private cabin rental, not the public fishing lodge they always used, booked for that exact same August weekend. And there was a charge for a local florist, plus a boutique lingerie shop over in the strip mall she has never in her life set foot in.

She grabbed a ballpoint pen and wrote every single date and dollar amount on the back of a church bulletin in her neat, precise teacher’s handwriting. Every line was straight. Every number was exact.

Then she did something that made my stomach turn over. She walked right out to the garage, smiling like nothing was wrong, and asked Gene if she should start pulling his tackle boxes and gear out of the attic for the trip.

I heard him through the open door. He said sure, hon, thanks for handling it.

She came right back inside, sat down in her chair, and finished her slice of coffee cake like nothing had happened. Then she picked up her phone again and scrolled down her contacts until she found the one saved as “Dentist.”

She stared at the screen for a long second. Her thumb hovered right over the call button.

Just as her thumb touched the glass, someone knocked hard and fast on the front door. Three loud raps that rattled the stained-glass suncatcher hanging in the frame.

We both froze. Gene was still out in the garage sorting through old fishing line. Nobody was expected on a Thursday afternoon.

Loretta set her phone down on the table, stood up slowly, and walked to the front window by the door. She parted the sheer curtain with two fingers and looked out onto the porch. Whatever she saw out there made her go completely, terrifyingly still.

She turned around, white to the lips, and whispered, “That’s her. She’s standing on my porch. And she brought a suitcase.”

Before I could even breathe, the front door handle jiggled and someone twisted it from the outside. Gene had left it unlocked because he was in and out of the garage. The door swung open and a young woman with bleached blonde hair and a heavy canvas weekender bag stepped right into the foyer like she owned the place.

She stopped dead when she saw Loretta and me sitting at the kitchen table.

The stranger looked around the entryway, taking in the framed family portraits of Gene and Loretta on their twenty-fifth anniversary, and then she looked right at Loretta with an expression of pure, stunned confusion.

She clutched the strap of her bag and said, “Wait. You’re still here.”

Loretta didn’t scream. She didn’t drop a plate. She just pushed her chair back, stood up nice and slow, and walked out of the kitchen into the hallway to face her husband’s other life standing right on her welcome mat.