They left within twenty minutes. The false report became its own problem for him, and the marriage in Nevada was void from the moment it was performed. Priya found out from a detective, not from him, and I have thought about that phone call more than I expected to. She wrote to me in November. Four lines. She had believed he was separated for a year and a half. I believe her, and I wrote back, and we are not friends but we are not strangers either.

The divorce took five months and cost him the car, which had been financed on my credit, and most of his pension, because the ten months of expenditure on a woman he was not married to are quite legible on a statement. He rents in Sparks now and works somewhere smaller.

I still live in the house. I painted the front door a colour he would have called impractical. The locksmith, whose name is Abel, does a yearly check on the deadbolts and refuses to charge me.

He thought boring meant forgettable. It turned out it meant I was the one who had been holding the whole structure upright, quietly, for eight years, and the morning I stopped doing it for him was the first morning it finally belonged to me.