I was not snooping. People always say that when they were absolutely digging through their spouse’s private life, but I really was not. I was just trying to get Patsy Cline to play while I mixed ground chuck and breadcrumbs because the silence in that kitchen had started to feel too heavy.

The little black speaker our daughter gave us for Christmas sat on the corner of the counter next to the paper towel holder. Robert’s phone was synced to it automatically whenever he walked through the back door. When his Spotify account popped up on the old tablet we kept by the recipe box to look up casserole directions, I only wanted to tap the screen and pick a station.

That is where I saw it.

R plus S, Route 17.

The cover photo was a blurry snapshot of a car dashboard taken at night. I knew that dashboard immediately because there is a small hairline crack right by the speedometer that Robert had promised our neighbor Arlene’s son he would fix three summers ago with a tube of epoxy. He never did.

The playlist had forty-two songs.

The very first track was Could I Have This Dance. That was our song. We danced to it at the Moose Lodge on our twenty-fifth anniversary while our friends clapped off beat and my ankles hurt from heels I should never have worn.

The date added next to it said April sixth.

April sixth was a Tuesday. That was the night Robert called from his sedan to say a semi truck had broken down outside Savannah and he had to sleep in a motel near the interchange because the tow company was backed up until morning.

I remember that night clearly because I ate dry Cheerios out of a coffee mug and watched a rerun of a game show with the volume turned down so I would not wake the dog.

He came home the next morning smelling like motel soap and cheap coffee, carrying a small paper bag of pecan pralines he claimed he bought from a customer who appreciated the extra hours on the service call.

I stood there in the quiet kitchen with raw beef on my hands, reading down the list. There were motel songs. Road songs. A stupid track we used to laugh at back when we were first dating because Robert swore the steel guitar sounded like a dentist drill on a bad molar.

The meat smelled like onion powder and Worcestershire sauce. I remember the smell of that seasoning more clearly than I remember breathing.

Robert came home at six-eleven. He kissed the back of my neck, washed his hands at the double basin, and sat down at the wooden table like he did every single night of our married life.

I put the meatloaf on the table. Green beans from a frozen bag. Mashed potatoes from a cardboard box because I was not standing at the stove peeling russets for a man whose mind was clearly on some highway fifty miles past the county line.

Halfway through dinner, while he was chewing a bite of potatoes, I asked the question without looking up from my fork.

Who is S?

He kept cutting his meatloaf with the serrated butter knife.

He did not even look up from his plate.

Don’t make old songs lonely, he said.

That was such a bizarre, theatrical answer that for one full second I almost accepted it as poetry instead of guilt. I felt a hot flash of embarrassment rush up my neck just remembering how badly I wanted a harmless explanation. I sat there in the yellow kitchen light and gave him about four extra seconds to laugh and say it was an old band name or a joke with the guys at the yard.

He did not laugh. He just swallowed his bite and reached for the salt.

After he went upstairs to take his shower and get ready for bed, I did not follow him. I stayed at the kitchen table with the tablet and an old spiral notebook I pulled out of the junk drawer under the telephone.

I copied every song. Every date added. Every little collaborator icon that showed who had downloaded or edited the tracks. The account name was not Robert’s usual handle. It was registered under a username called sandra 17blue.

Sandra.

I knew only one Sandra in Robert’s world. Sandra Whitcomb, his regional supervisor from the district office in Macon, who had sent us a holiday basket back in December with a tin of pecan turtles and the word Blessings written in gold ink on the card.

I kept scrolling through the history. The dates matched every single time Robert had a late service audit or an emergency call out of town. The two-day seminar in Valdosta. The inventory weekend in Brunswick. The supply run to the coast that kept him away from home while my sister was in the hospital having her knee replaced.

The twist came at twelve-four in the morning when the house was completely dark except for the blue glow of the screen.

I clicked on the playlist details and saw a small note typed underneath the title in lowercase letters.

For the road back to the place we started.

Right below that was a saved location link. Not a song file. A dropped pin on a digital map.

It pointed directly to the Savannah Palms Motor Inn on the north side of the bypass.

Room two-fourteen.

The room number was mentioned in a public comment attached to a shared track from an old Eagles album. And underneath that comment, Sandra had left Robert one line that I read out loud to the empty walls of my own kitchen because my brain refused to process it silently.

Tell her the song was never hers.

I sat there with the pen still pressed against the blue lines of the Dollar General notebook until the ink leaked through to the page underneath. Robert’s boots were sitting by the back door right where they always were, caked with dry red clay from the job site, looking like they belonged to a man who had never been anywhere except home.