Kristen Ward stood at my back gate in a sundress, would not look at Dennis, looked only at me, and held out a manila envelope. Mrs Carroll, she said, I am so sorry. I did not know he was married until your agency called me back.
Twenty-six years as a travel agent in Myrtle Beach, and I can see every booking, every seat assignment, every hotel a man makes with his frequent flier number. When the Cancún confirmation came to our shared iPad with two travelers on it, Dennis Carroll and Ms Kristen Ward, I did not fall apart. I pulled his history instead. Five years of it. Trips I never took. Rooms I never slept in. Names I never heard.
Kristen had called my own agency the week before to ask about an upgrade, not knowing the agency was mine. When my office called her back and the pieces fit together, she learned she was not a girlfriend being spoiled. She was a woman being lied to, same as me, just newer at it.
So she brought me the envelope. In it were the things Dennis had told her, the promises, the photos, and, because Kristen worked in accounting at his company, something heavier. Dennis had been charging his trips, mine that never happened and hers that did, to a company card.
He called me the last good woman in South Carolina in front of six golf buddies. He had been booking another woman a seat beside him for years, on his employers dime.
The golf buddies went quiet on the newspaper and the shrimp. Dennis stood there with Old Bay on his hands and nothing to say.
Between my booking records and Kristens envelope, the picture was complete, and some of it was the kind that interests a company and not just a divorce lawyer. I filed with all of it, dated and sourced the way twenty-six years taught me, and a protective order for the day he threw my anniversary suitcase into the pool and watched my good dress float up out of it.
Kristen and I are not friends, exactly. But she did a brave and decent thing at my gate, and I told her so. I fished my good dress out of the pool. I did not fish out the marriage.