The Stranger in Our Bed

Five years married, and from the outside my husband is the husband everyone wants.

He texts back inside two minutes. He makes chowder when I work late. At our last anniversary dinner he stood up at the table and gave a speech about me that made the woman at the next booth cry into her wine.

I have been cold for a year.

There is a hidden album on his phone. The passcode isn't my birthday.

Every August, three nights, his work calendar reads *off-site*. The expense card hits the same Vermont B&B. Same room. Same dates. He has never once told me.

I am an architect. I spec construction joints to a tolerance of one-sixteenth of an inch. I cannot spec my own dread, because I have nothing — no number, no receipt, nothing I could say to a friend at brunch without watching her face go careful.

So I'm going to find something.