The video was forty seconds of a hotel corridor camera, and the woman in it was not a stranger. It was Corinne from three doors down, who had brought us a casserole when my mother died. The date stamp was eight weeks old. Whoever sent it had cut it so that the only face you see clearly is my husband’s, standing outside a room door at half past eleven at night, and the sender was Corinne’s own husband, Ambrose, who had found it while disputing a charge on their credit card.

He had not covered the car in her lingerie to humiliate me. He told me that later, on my porch, both of us wrecked, and I believed him. He had done it because he had spent three weeks trying to work out how to tell me and had not been able to form the sentence, and that morning he had simply stopped being able to hold it in. Every item on that bonnet had come out of his own wife’s drawer.