The silence in my living room felt heavier than usual that Tuesday afternoon. I sat by the window, clutching a lukewarm mug of tea, watching the rain streak across the glass in uneven lines. My eyes kept drifting toward the house across the street, a perfectly manicured colonial with a bright red door. That door belonged to Elise, a woman who always had a kind word for everyone and baked the best lemon bars in the neighborhood. Howard, her husband, was a different story—a man of expensive suits and even more expensive excuses.

I didn’t want to be the person who broke a home, but I couldn’t unsee what I’d seen the night before. I had been coming home late from a shift at the library when I saw Howard’s car parked in the shadows of the park two blocks over. He wasn’t alone. The woman in the passenger seat was laughing, her hand resting familiarly on his shoulder, and the way Howard looked at her wasn’t the way a man looks at a colleague or a distant cousin. It was the look of someone who thought they were invisible to the world.