The Last Reading

The sweat pooled in her palm as she gripped the steering wheel, watching his apartment building loom ahead like a tombstone. Three years of Tuesday afternoons had taught her that the drive home was always the hardest part—the reentry into her other life, where she was someone's mother, someone's wife, someone who didn't keep secrets in the glove compartment.

The cable-knit sweater he'd given her last month lay folded on the passenger seat, its coarse wool already pilling where she'd clutched it during their last goodbye. She'd found one of his hairs woven into the fabric that morning, dark and defiant against the cream yarn, and had spent ten minutes extracting it with tweezers, terrified her husband might notice. The absurdity of it—she was sleeping with another man, but a stray hair was what she couldn't risk.

"You're going to get caught," her sister had warned over brunch yesterday, pushing aside her untouched orange juice. "You're not being careful anymore."

But careful was exhausting. Careful meant deleting texts immediately. Careful meant showering at the gym before going home. Careful meant checking her palms for sweat before walking through her front door, because damp hands meant guilt, and her husband had stopped asking what was wrong months ago.

Her phone buzzed. Him: *Can you come up? Just for a minute.*

She should drive away. The orange sunset was already staining the horizon, the day nearly gone. Tomorrow was their anniversary—eighteen years—and she'd already bought the card, already written *love always* inside, already performed the role of woman who hadn't been slowly hollowing out for three hundred Tuesdays.

Her palm hovered over the door handle. In the end, she didn't decide. Her body simply moved, as it had been moving for three years, toward its own undoing.