I Took My Wife To A Party. She Left With Another Man Because He’s Rich. He Threw A Dollar Bill On…

“I told you I’d be late. The party went long, and then a bunch of us went to another colleague’s suite to keep celebrating. I crashed on their couch.”

She gestured to the jacket like it was evidence of innocence instead of guilt.

“Oh, Gavin let me borrow this. It got cold.”

Right, because 3:00 in the morning is prime time for PowerPoint presentations and professional development. Because you need a man’s suit jacket in a climate-controlled hotel. Because your husband is stupid enough to believe that you spent seven hours in someone’s suite doing anything besides what we both know you were doing.

Then I saw it, just visible above the collar of that expensive jacket, right there on her neck where it met her shoulder: a mark. Not just any mark, but the kind of purple-red bruise that has exactly one cause and zero innocent explanations. Someone had stamped “Property of Moron” right on her skin, left their signature like a dog marking territory.

A hickey. A goddamn hickey. At 44 years old, my wife came home with a hickey like she was 16 and making out in her boyfriend’s basement.

“You’ve got something on your neck,” I said, pointing with one grease-stained finger.

Her hand flew up to cover it, her face cycling through surprise, panic, and then landing on defiance.

“It’s just—I must have burned myself with a curling iron yesterday. You know how clumsy I am.”

The curling iron. She was going with the curling iron excuse. I’ve been married to this woman for 23 years, watched her get ready approximately 8,000 times, and not once had she ever burned herself with a curling iron.

But sure, today of all days, she suddenly developed a coordination problem that resulted in a perfectly mouth-shaped burn mark.

“Right,” I said. “The curling iron.”

She turned away from me, busied herself with the coffee maker like it was the most important task in human history, and started humming—actually humming some pop song I didn’t recognize. She started making small talk about the weather, about needing to pick up dry cleaning, about whether we should do turkey or ham for Christmas dinner. She was acting like nothing had happened, like she hadn’t just walked in wearing another man’s clothes with his mouth print on her neck, like our marriage wasn’t actively bleeding out on the kitchen floor.

I watched her pour coffee into her favorite mug, the one that said “Boss Lady” that I’d bought her as a joke three birthdays ago. I watched her add the exact amount of cream she always used, two sugars, stirring it precisely seven times clockwise because she had this weird superstition about counterclockwise stirring bringing bad luck. She was playing normal, committed to the bit, and something inside me just broke.

It didn’t break loudly or dramatically, but quietly, like a rope that’s been fraying for years finally giving up its last thread. That’s when I decided: the locks were changing today, this morning, before she could walk back through that door with another man’s jacket and another weak excuse. I was done being the decorative plant, done being worth a dollar, done pretending that any of this was salvageable. She kept humming, and I started planning.

The Hardware of Dignity

Sunday morning hit me like a hangover, except I was completely sober, which somehow made it worse. I’d spent the rest of Saturday avoiding Miranda while she floated around the house pretending to be confused about why I wasn’t talking to her. It was as if my silence was some mysterious phenomenon instead of a completely reasonable response to her showing up in another man’s jacket with a hickey that could be seen from space.

She’d gone to bed in the guest room without me asking her to, which told me everything I needed to know about her guilty conscience. Cheaters always tell on themselves eventually; they just can’t help it. I was up at 6:00, made coffee strong enough to strip paint, and headed straight to Home Depot before the DIY weekend warriors could clog up the aisles with their confusion about which end of a hammer to hold.

There’s something deeply American about solving your problems at a hardware store. Marriage falling apart? There’s a product for that, wife cheating, aisle seven, next to the deadbolts and your dignity. I walked through those automatic doors with a mission, and that mission was to buy locks so strong they could keep out the apocalypse, zombies, and cheating spouses in that order of importance.

The lock aisle was more complicated than it needed to be, filled with options that ranged from “a determined child could pick this” to “you’ll need a battering ram and a prayer.” I stood there reading packages like I was studying for the SAT, comparing security ratings and features I didn’t know existed. There were smart locks that connected to your phone, locks with keypads, locks that probably could have launched nuclear missiles if you entered the right code.

But I went old school—Schlage deadbolts, grade one security rating, the kind of locks that locksmiths respect and burglars cry about. I bought four of them, one for every exterior door, plus new handles that matched because if I was doing this, I was doing it right. The cashier was a kid who couldn’t have been older than 20, sporting a name tag that said Brandon and a facial expression that said he’d rather be literally anywhere else.

He scanned my locks without comment until I added a drill bit set and a new screwdriver to the order, and then his eyes got a little knowing.

“Home improvement project?” he asked in that way cashiers do when they’re bored and trying to make conversation.

“Something like that,” I said. “More like home security. Keeping the wrong people out.”

“I feel that,” Brandon said, nodding like he understood the philosophical weight of changing locks at 7:00 in the morning on a Sunday. “My ex kept showing up at my apartment after we broke up. Had to change my locks three times before she got the hint.”

I wanted to tell him that at least his ex was just showing up, not showing up in other dudes’ clothes, but that felt like oversharing with a stranger who was just trying to get through his shift.

“Women, right?” I said instead, and he laughed and gave me some kind of bro-code nod that made me feel ancient and young at the same time.

The total came to just under 300 bucks, which felt like the cheapest investment in my sanity I’d ever made. I loaded everything into my truck, stopped at Dunkin’ for a box of donuts and another coffee, and headed home with the grim determination of a man about to change more than just his locks. Miranda’s car was still in the driveway, which meant she was either still asleep or hiding in the house trying to figure out her next move.

I didn’t care which. I grabbed my purchases and headed straight to the front door, the main entrance that she used every single day. It was the door she’d walked through tonight after whatever activity she’d planned to avoid actually dealing with our marriage.

Installing new locks is oddly satisfying when you’re angry. There’s something cathartic about unscrewing the old hardware, removing the mechanisms that used to let someone in, and replacing them with shiny new barriers that require different keys—keys she didn’t have, keys she wouldn’t get. I worked methodically, starting with the front door and moving around the house—back door, side door, garage entrance.