By the time my husband graduated from medical school I had spent eight years paying for it. On the lawn afterward his mother took the flowers out of my hands, he pushed an envelope into them, and I opened it standing in front of eighty people.

I said, “I paid because we were trying to survive.”

“I know.”

“Then why does that matter now?”

“Because incoming resident files get reviewed,” Idris said. “And he thought if the school escalated it, your name would get pulled into it too.”

I sat there holding an envelope with divorce papers in it.

“So he did this to protect me.”

Idris hesitated for slightly too long.

“He said that was part of it.”

Part of it.

He told me Teo was at a motel on Thistle Road and that he had driven him there himself the night before, and then he said the only other thing he said all afternoon, which was: “I’ve known him four years and I’d have told you this two weeks ago if I’d known you didn’t know.”

Teo opened the motel door on the second knock.

He was still in the dress shirt with the sleeves rolled and the tie hanging loose, graduation clothes on him like they had been lent to him.