A sweet, floral perfume.
It was strong enough that I noticed it immediately, and unfamiliar enough that I lifted the collar toward my face for a second sniff.
I didn’t need to smell it twice.
I knew it wasn’t mine.
For a few moments, I stood completely still.
Then I lowered the shirt into the basket and stared at the washing machine as though it might offer me an explanation.
Perhaps someone at his office had hugged him.
Perhaps a colleague had leaned too close while talking.
Perhaps the perfume had come from a crowded elevator.
I could invent a dozen innocent explanations if I wanted to.
And I wanted to.
Because the alternative meant confronting a possibility I had been avoiding for months.
My husband might be having an affair.
Tyler and I had been married for eighteen years. We had two children, a son and a daughter, both of whom were now away at college. We had survived sleepless nights with newborns, arguments about money, exhausting school runs, family illnesses, and the ordinary disappointments that slowly test a marriage.
