The jealous, aggrieved wife in me wants to scratch her eyes out for trying to take my husband away from me.

And she’s blaming me for her unhappiness? Seriously?

I have to fight to stay cool, only because I want more information. “Just tell me how you met him.”

She won’t look at me when she talks. “He came into the hardware store to buy a furnace filter. We didn’t have the kind he needed, so I had to special order it. I asked for his number so that I could call him when it came in.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Three years ago. It was summertime.”

I shift uneasily in my seat. “How soon after that did you start the affair?”

“Pretty soon after.” She meets my eyes with a look of pure misery. “When he came in to pick up the filter, it was my birthday, and he was so nice.”

There’s a hot pounding in my ears, and my body begins to tremble with rage. “Just tell me how it happened.”

She keeps her eyes fixed on mine, and I can’t decide if she’s full of grief and remorse or if she wants to rub this in my face like sandpaper. “We flirted and started texting each other, and then we met for a drink.”

As I imagine all of this happening, my stomach turns because I can’t imagine Alan—my darling Alan—falling under the spell of another woman. A woman who was married herself and obviously had no qualms about flirting with a married man with a teenage son. I want to scream and hit something, but there’s no way in hell I’ll let this morph into an episode of Jerry Springer in which we start screaming and throwing chairs at each other. I want to keep my cool.

“Were you married back then?” I ask.

“Yes. Just for a year or so.”

“That seems a bit soon to start cheating.”

She shakes her head with something that might be regret, but I can’t be sure. “Michael isn’t the easiest man to live with. He can be controlling sometimes. I probably shouldn’t have married him. But then Alan came along, and he was the opposite. He was so kind and caring.”

I wonder which of them was the instigator in all of this. The part of me that still loves my husband wants to believe it wasn’t his fault—that he was seduced and manipulated by a beautiful woman who was desperate to escape her own imperfect marriage. But I don’t know anything anymore. For all I know, Alan could have recognized that she was vulnerable and in need of a hero, and maybe that was what he couldn’t resist.

“Who started it?” I ask plainly. “You or Alan?”

“I don’t know,” she replies. “We both did, I guess. The attraction was intense.”

I look away, because hearing about their attraction makes me want to scream.

It also makes me feel inadequate—like a failure as a wife for not recognizing that our marriage was in trouble or for not working harder to keep the romance alive in the first place. But I was so busy with work, doing a lot of night shifts. I didn’t always have time for him. I certainly didn’t need him to be my hero. I prided myself on being a strong, independent woman, and I always made it clear that he wasn’t responsible for my happiness. I didn’t want to put that on him.

Was that the problem? Did he not feel needed? Was that why he’d had an affair?

Or was that when he stopped wanting me sexually? When he already had Paula on the side?

And how often did they come here? Was she better than me?

No. Abbie, don’t go there . . .

I turn and look at Paula again. She starts to cry, but I have no desire to comfort her. After a moment, she collects herself and slides her drunken gaze to meet mine. “I should have known he was never going to leave you. You should feel happy about that.”

Happy? Was she serious?

I’m breathing heavily now. It feels almost like a panic attack.

“Do you and Michael have any children of your own?” I ask, taking a few deep breaths.

“No,” she replies. “I wanted kids, and he knew it. But as soon as we were married, he told me that he’d had a vasectomy years ago.”

“God.” As much as I don’t want to feel sympathy for her, I can’t help thinking that that kind of trickery was wrong of him.

Paula turns to me. “I’m not going home tonight. Michael and I had a really bad fight on the phone after he talked to you, which is why I’m here and not there.” She watches me for a moment. “I suppose I should thank you for getting me out of that bar in one piece.”

“I didn’t do it for you. I came here because I wanted answers, and I still want to know what happened on the night Alan died. I don’t understand how he could have gotten behind the wheel when he was drinking. Now that I know he was having an affair with you, I’m wondering what else was going on that night.”

She lowers her gaze. “He was very upset that weekend.”

Her reply hits me like a brick in the head. I sit forward in the chair. “Tell me what you know.”

She hesitates, and it feels like she’s keeping quiet so that she can feel superior and wallow in the fact that she knew my husband better than I did.

At last, her eyes lift. “There’s no point keeping it to myself, because you’re probably going to find out about it anyway, when you get the autopsy report.”

I rest my elbows on my knees and frown. “Autopsy report? Jesus, Paula. What do you know?”

She covers her face with her hands and starts sobbing inconsolably.

Oh God, stop it! Maybe it’s cruel of me, but I feel only impatience and hostility. I want to shake her until she breaks apart and squeeze the truth out of her once and for all.

Paula can’t stop crying, so I go to the bathroom and get a roll of toilet paper. I hand her a few squares to wipe her tears and blow her nose.

She finally collects herself, takes a deep breath, and begins to explain. She dumps it on me so fast I nearly lose my balance.

“On the Friday before the accident, Alan found out he had cancer.”

I blink a few times. “What? That can’t be true. He would have told me.”

But I should know better than to presume anything. At this point, nothing is out of the realm of possibility.

But how could he have told Paula first, while keeping it from me? Did that mean it was true love between them? Not just sex?

She rises from the sofa and goes to the kitchen. I follow, but I give her a moment before I ask another question. “When did he tell you this?”

“Friday afternoon. As soon as he got out of the doctor’s office.”

I’m trying to digest this news—that my husband had cancer—but I can’t seem to get past the fact that when he learned of it, he called Paula and not me.

Where was I that night? I was in the OR.

Then I try to remember if he was different over the next two days, and I recall that he seemed tired on Saturday afternoon. When I asked if he was okay, he brushed it off and said he might be coming down with something. I made him a cup of tea, and he seemed to perk up after that. He was obviously very good at keeping me in the dark.

“What can you tell me about the diagnosis?” I ask, digging deep for the doctor in me, not the wife who has never felt more betrayed or more like a failure as a woman.

Paula stares at the floor. “I don’t know. It wasn’t good. All I know is that he went to see his doctor about a mark on his shoulder that he thought looked suspicious. Then he found out it was cancer, which started in his kidneys and had already spread everywhere . . . to his lungs, liver, and bones. There were hardly any symptoms other than the mark on his shoulder. The doctor gave him three months to live.”

I feel suddenly breathless and cover my face with my hands. Hot tears fill my eyes.

Paula doesn’t let up. “He called on Sunday to tell me that he wanted to end it between us and spend whatever time he had left with you. I tried to change his mind, but I couldn’t. So you won in the end.”

I look up. “I beg your pardon?”

She stares at me with bitterness. “He wanted to spend his last days with you and Zack. So there you go, Abbie. Congratulations.”

I stare at her in shock. “Are you kidding me? You think I should feel triumphant? As if the past three years of lies and infidelity never happened?”

She turns away from me, staggering slightly because she’s still intoxicated. “This is messed up.”

“You’re damn right it is.” I follow her. “I’ll never really know if he would have spent his last days with Zack and me. Was he coming here to see you on Sunday? Had he changed his mind?” I realize I’m shouting now, and I try to cool my temper. “And why the hell was he drunk driving, regardless?”

“I’m not sure, but he was angry with me because I threatened to tell you everything. The last time I spoke to him was on Sunday afternoon, and he was upset. He hung up on me, and I think he must have gone to a bar or a liquor store after that.”

“What do you mean exactly, that he was upset?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know . . . he said he screwed everything up, and he begged me not to tell you about us. He went on and on about what a bad person he was and how he was sorry for ruining my life. I told him I wasn’t going to just disappear and leave him to die alone. I said I wanted to be by his side until the very end, but that just made him even more angry. He reminded me that he wouldn’t be alone. He’d have you. Then he told me to stay away, that it was over between us.” Her voice shakes while she fights not to cry. “I was begging him not to end it, and that’s when he said he’d be better off dead if I told you the truth, and he hung up on me.”

My eyebrows pull together in a frown. “Better off dead? Wait a second . . . was he suicidal?”

She sobs. “I don’t know! Part of me wonders if he was coming to see me because he’d changed his mind, or maybe he was coming here to threaten me in person, to make sure I’d keep quiet. Now I’ll never know for sure. And neither will you.”