Colleen propped her bad leg up on the sofa cushions and handed me the stack of mail. Her knee was swollen up to the size of a honeydew melon from the surgery she had three days ago at Wesley Medical Center out on Broadway. She was stuck on that couch for six weeks, minimum, and the bills didn’t care about her meniscus.

She asked me to open the envelopes and read off the balances so she wouldn’t have to keep twisting her back.

I sat in the armchair across from her with a letter opener I found in the kitchen drawer. The kitchen had that smell Colleen always kept it at, lemon dish soap and cheap vanilla candles. I slit open the electric bill first, then the water, then the credit card statement. Everything looked normal. Groceries at Dillons, gas at QuikTrip, a prescription copay from the pharmacy on Central.

Then I pulled out the statement from Intrust Bank.

I didn’t think much of it until my eyes hit the second page under automatic payments.

There was a line item that didn’t fit with the rest of the groceries and gas. One thousand one hundred fifty dollars. Every single month, on the twelfth, pulled straight out of their joint checking account. The payee was listed as Oak Park Management.

I read the numbers out loud without really thinking about them. Colleen frowned from the couch, her hands resting on the blue fleece blanket over her lap.

“That must be the business storage,” she said. She didn’t even look up from her phone where she was scrolling through a puzzle game. “Wade rents a spot out on the east side for pallets and equipment. His distributor doesn’t give him enough warehouse space.”

I looked at the paper again. One thousand one hundred fifty dollars a month. That was more than Colleen paid for her first car, every single month, for a storage locker.

“Wade keeps pallets in a place that costs eleven-fifty a month?” I asked.

“Well, he has a lot of heavy inventory,” she said, still defending him out of sheer habit. Nineteen years of marriage makes you fluent in covering for a man. “You know how those beverage distributorships are. They make the drivers store extra promotional displays and coolers.”

I didn’t say anything to that. I just reached for the stack of unopened envelopes she had piled next to the tissue box.

I pulled out the statement from the month before. I ran my finger down the page until I found it. Same amount. Same company. I pulled the statement from two months before that. Same thing.

I flipped back through twelve months of papers right there on the coffee table. The charge went back two full years. Twenty-four months of eleven hundred and fifty dollars vanishing into an account neither of us recognized.

My mouth felt dry, like I had been chewing on saltine crackers.

“Colleen,” I said, and my voice sounded thinner than I wanted it to. “Storage units in Wichita don’t run eleven-fifty a month. And I’ve never seen one that gets its own automatic bank draft under a property management name.”

She stopped scrolling on her phone. The silence in the living room suddenly got very heavy, the kind of quiet where you can hear the refrigerator humming down the hall.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean Oak Park Management isn’t a storage place,” I said. “Let me just check it on my phone. Give me a second.”

I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and typed the name into the search bar. The first result came up right away. It wasn’t a corrugated metal warehouse with padlocks and chain-link fences. It was a sprawling two-story apartment complex out on the west side, near the highway past Tyler Road. One-bedroom and two-bedroom units with amenities.

I didn’t hand Colleen the phone right away. I just stared at the little glowing screen until my thumb started to sweat against the glass.

“Well?” she asked. Her voice had gone a little sharp, the way it did when we were kids and I wouldn’t tell her what was in our mother’s baking cabinet. “Yvonne, what is it?”

“It’s an apartment complex,” I said. I kept my eyes fixed on the screen. “Out on the west side.”

She didn’t move for a long second. She just stared at her knee in the brace, her fingers knotting into the blue fleece blanket.

“Call them,” she whispered.

“Colleen, you don’t, “

“Call them,” she said louder this time, her chin coming up. “Pretend you’re looking for a place. Just talk to them.”

I dialed the number from the search results. My hands felt clumsy, the buttons on the screen too small. A woman with a cheerful, professional phone voice answered on the second ring, asking if I was interested in a one-bedroom or a two-bedroom floor plan.

“Oh, actually, I’m calling about an existing lease,” I said, trying to make my voice sound like a real customer service caller. “My husband handles it, but he’s out on his delivery route today. I just wanted to verify the unit number for a delivery. The name is Wade Ellison.”

The woman on the other end clicked something on her keyboard. There was a pause of maybe two seconds, but it felt like an hour while the traffic hummed outside Colleen’s front window.

“Oh yes, Mr. Ellison,” the woman said, cheerful as anything. “Unit 214. He and his wife have been with us since twenty-twenty-four.”

He and his wife.

The words came through the tiny speaker of my phone clear as a bell. I didn’t even cover the mouthpiece. Colleen was watching my face, and I suppose she didn’t need to hear the woman’s voice because she could read it right off my expression.

“Thank you,” I choked out. “That’s all I needed.”

I hung up the phone and laid it facedown on the coffee table.

Colleen didn’t cry. That was the thing that scared me the most. She didn’t drop her head or start sobbing like women do in the movies. She just looked down at the big metal-and-foam brace holding her leg straight, reaching out with one finger to trace the edge of the velcro strap over and over again like she was checking to make sure it was real.

“He and his wife,” she said to the room. She said it very quietly, almost to herself.

“I’ll go,” I said, standing up so fast the coffee table wobbled. “Colleen, stay here. Put your ice pack back on. I’ll drive out to the west side right now and see what’s going on.”

She looked up at me then. Her eyes were dry and bright, the pupils small and hard.

“No,” she said.

“Colleen, you can’t even walk without crutches.”

“If there is a woman living in an apartment my husband pays for, and she thinks she’s his wife, then I’m going to be the one standing at that door,” she said. She didn’t raise her voice, but there was a steel in it that I hadn’t heard since our father died.

I tried to argue with her for five minutes, but arguing with Colleen once she set her jaw was like trying to push a freight train off the tracks with your bare hands. She hopped off the couch on her good leg, grabbing her aluminum crutches from the side of the recliner with a clatter that knocked over a stack of magazines. I had to help her maneuver out the front door and down the concrete porch steps, folding her long legs carefully into the passenger seat of my sedan while she hissed through her teeth in pain.

We didn’t talk the whole drive across town. The traffic on Kellogg was heavy, the usual afternoon crawl of pickup trucks and delivery vans kicking up exhaust in the humid air. I kept glancing over at her. She was staring straight ahead through the windshield, her hands clamped hard around the handle above the passenger door, her knuckles white enough to look like bone.

We turned off the highway onto a side street lined with brick apartment buildings that all looked the same, identical rows of brown siding and tiny balconies with plastic chairs and bicycles.

I pulled into the parking lot of Oak Park Management and cut the engine.

Building B sat near the back of the complex, right against a chain-link fence overgrown with honeysuckle. Unit 214 was on the ground floor. There was a small welcome mat outside the door and a wreath made of fake fall leaves hanging from the brass knocker. A little red plastic tricycle sat right on the concrete walkway.

We sat in the car for a full minute. The engine ticked as it cooled down.

“We don’t have to do this right now,” I said, my hand shaking on the steering wheel. “We can go back to your house. We can wait until Wade gets home and confront him there.”

Before Colleen could answer, the wooden door of unit 214 swung open.

A woman walked out. She looked younger than Colleen, maybe early thirties, wearing a yellow t-shirt and denim shorts with her blonde hair pulled back in a messy clip. She was holding the hand of a little boy who couldn’t have been more than three years old. He had a head of thick, dark curly hair and a little round nose that I would have known anywhere.

It was Wade’s face, shrunk down to half-pint size, looking up at his mother and laughing about something she said.

Colleen reached down, gripped the door handle of my car, and pushed it open before I could even reach across the console to stop her.