On our 25th anniversary, my husband raised his glass and said, “it’s time for someone younger. pack your things.” he didn’t realize the apartment was mine. I took the microphone—and what I said next made the room go silent.

The end of my twenty-five-year marriage began not with a bang, but with a whisper. It was three in the morning, the hour of ghosts and secrets, when I woke to the sound of my husband, Darren Price, on the phone with his mother. His voice, usually a placid baritone, was laced with a strange, conspiratorial excitement that made the fine hairs on my arms stand on end. I lay perfectly still in the darkness of our Georgetown condo, straining to catch snippets of their conversation.

“We have to do this right, Mom,” Darren’s voice insisted, a low thrum from behind our bedroom door. “She can’t suspect a thing.”