I know what you are going to think of me. Honestly, I have spent a lot of nights at 3 in the morning staring at my bedroom ceiling and thinking those exact same things about myself. I was the other woman. For two years, I was the one Gerald Prewitt came to on Thursday nights, the one he swore he was finally leaving his wife for, the one he claimed he was building a lake cabin for so we could start over.

I told myself his marriage was a hollow shell. I told myself that the papers were already drawn up and that Diane, his wife who arranged the altar flowers at their church in Springfield, was just a ghost in his house. I believed him. I wanted to believe him so badly that I ignored the way he checked his phone every time it dinged and the way he always had to be home by a certain hour on the weekends.

I am not going to offer you some grand excuse for why I let it start. That part is mine to carry.

If I told you the whole story of how we met or why I felt so alone that a man like Gerald seemed like a lifeline, you would either forgive me too easily or you would hate me for trying to justify the unjustifiable. I will not do that to either of us. I am just going to own the mess I made.

Gerald was very good at what he did. He made me feel like the exception to every rule. He told me the cabin outside Branson was our secret sanctuary. He told me the master bath in the loft was being designed specifically for me, with my favorite colors and a soaking tub that was deep enough for two.

I spent hours on Pinterest and even more hours walking the aisles at the Lowe’s in Ozark.

I remember the day I found the tile. It was a soft, matte sage green that looked like the moss on the rocks near the creek behind my childhood home. I held the sample up to the window light in the store, and for a second, I felt like a queen. I was sure. I was special. I was the one he was going to choose.

Then came the call.

It was a Tuesday, a day he was never supposed to call me, but the phone rang at 4:18 PM. It was Vince, the contractor Gerald hired for the cabin.

Vince had saved my number under a name that wasn’t mine, and he clearly thought he was talking to someone else entirely.

“Hey,” Vince said, his voice sounding busy and tired. “The shipment of vanities is here. I need to know which bathroom the other Mrs. Prewitt wants tiled first. The master or the guest suite?”

The silence that followed wasn’t just quiet. It was heavy. I didn’t say a word. I just held the phone against my ear and stopped breathing.

“Hello?” Vince asked. “You still there?”

“Yes,” I whispered. I don’t know why I didn’t just hang up. I think I was waiting for him to correct himself. I was waiting for him to laugh and say he had the wrong person.

“Good,” Vince continued, oblivious. “Because the other one has been out here twice this month already. She is asking for the soaking tub. She says she wants the sage green tile in both bathrooms, but I told her we only have enough for one.”

Eight words. That was all it took to tear the foundation of my life out from under me. Other Mrs. Prewitt.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t drop the phone. I just stood there in my kitchen while the sunlight faded across the floorboards. I felt a cold, sharp pit open up in my stomach, and underneath the pain, there was a quiet, ugly voice that whispered, so you were never even the special one.

I had been telling myself I was the real thing. I was the woman he was finally going to leave his wife for. Instead, I was just a Thursday. Just one Thursday among his many Thursdays. I realized that my life had been a carefully curated performance, and I was just a recurring character in a script Gerald wrote for himself.

I didn’t call Gerald. That surprised me later. I didn’t cry or leave a dozen voicemails. I got very quiet and very focused. I needed to know if I was crazy or if I was just a fool. I decided that I was going to see the evidence with my own eyes before I did anything at all.

That Saturday, I drove the 40 minutes out to the cabin. His truck wasn’t there. Vince’s crew wasn’t there because it was the weekend. The door was unlocked, just like it always was, because Gerald was careless about the things he didn’t think mattered. He thought he was untouchable.

I walked into the cabin. The smell of fresh sawdust and paint filled my lungs. Everything looked exactly how I had imagined it in my head. I walked into the kitchen, the space I had picked the paint for, and I stopped cold.

There was a woman standing there.

She was holding a tile sample up to the very same window I had held mine to months ago. It was the exact same sage green. She was tall, with her hair pulled back in a loose knot, and she looked like she belonged in that kitchen more than I ever could.

She turned around when she heard my boots on the floor. She didn’t look scared or surprised. She just looked tired. She stared at me for a long, agonizing minute, and then she looked down at the tile in her hand.

“He told me the sage green was a custom order,” she said, her voice steady. “He told me he had to fight the supplier to get it for us.”

I felt the last of my resolve crack. I didn’t know what to say. I just stood there, clutching my purse like a shield.

“He told me the same thing,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. “He said he was building this for me.”

She sighed and set the tile down on the counter. She walked over to the kitchen island and pulled out a small leather-bound notebook. She flipped it open and slid it toward me. It was filled with receipts, sketches, and notes about paint colors and lighting fixtures.

“I have been tracking his building schedule for six months,” she said. “He told me he was out of town on business every other weekend. I started getting suspicious when the contractor kept calling my house with questions about floor plans.”

I walked closer, my hands shaking. I looked at the notebook. There were dates and times recorded in neat, meticulous handwriting. It was a log of his lies. I saw my own name on a sticky note tucked into the back of the book, along with a phone number I didn’t recognize.

“Who are you?” I asked, though I think I already knew.

“I am the one he calls on Tuesdays,” she said.

My heart sank. So there were at least three of us. Me on Thursdays, this woman on Tuesdays, and the wife, Diane, who I was sure was being lied to just as badly as we were.

“He is a coward,” she said, looking me in the eye. “He doesn’t want a divorce. He wants a collection of lives that never touch each other. He thinks if he keeps us apart, he can keep the truth from ever catching up to him.”

“What do we do?” I asked.

She looked at me and a small, dangerous smile touched her lips. It wasn’t a smile of a woman who had just had her heart broken. It was the smile of someone who had just finished planning a campaign.

“He thinks we are the ones who are going to be embarrassed,” she said. “He thinks we will tear each other apart for the prize of a man who isn’t even worth the tile we are holding.”

She reached into her bag and pulled out a second phone. She hit a few buttons and showed me the screen. It was a group message thread. There were three names in it. My name, hers, and a name I didn’t recognize.

“We invited the third one,” she said. “She will be here in ten minutes. We have the contractor, the blueprints, and we have the proof of everything he spent the last two years buying with his wife’s credit cards.”

I looked at the woman standing in the kitchen, this stranger who had been living the same lie as me. I felt the shame wash over me, but then it was replaced by something else. It was a cold, sharp clarity.

“He is coming here at 5 o’clock,” I said, my voice finally finding its strength.

“I know,” she replied. “He told me he was having a surprise meeting with his architect.”

We stood in that unfinished kitchen, surrounded by the ghosts of the lives we thought we were building, and we waited. We didn’t talk about Gerald anymore. We talked about ourselves. We talked about the things we had given up and the time we had wasted. We stood there like soldiers preparing for a battle we had already won because the enemy was so stupid he didn’t even know he was being surrounded.

I didn’t care about the sage green tile anymore. I didn’t care about the soaking tub. I just wanted to see the look on his face when he walked through that door and realized that all of his secrets had finally found each other in the one place he thought he was safe.

The sound of a truck pulling into the gravel driveway echoed through the cabin. It was his truck. The engine cut, and the silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard.

“Are you ready?” she asked, picking up her tile sample.

I picked up mine. “I have been ready for a long time.”

We turned toward the door as the handle began to turn. We didn’t look at each other, but we stood shoulder to shoulder. The door creaked open, and Gerald stepped inside, his face already set into his practiced, charming smile, the one he used when he wanted to tell a lie and make you believe it was the truth.

He stopped the moment he saw us. His smile vanished. He looked from her to me, and then he looked toward the back bedroom where the sound of another woman’s footsteps approached.

“You,” he said, his voice a pathetic, broken sound. “How did you…”

“We compared notes,” she said, and her voice was as cold as winter rain.

I just watched him. I watched the man I thought I loved crumble into the small, pathetic thing he really was. He looked for a way out, but the door was behind him, and we were standing between him and the rest of his life.

“We have a lot to talk about,” I said, “and you are going to listen to every single word.”

He didn’t have an answer. He didn’t even have a lie left. He just stood there, caught in the web he had spent years spinning, realizing for the first time that we weren’t his victims anymore. We were his witnesses. And we were going to make sure that everyone heard what he had done.