You have let yourself go, Deb. I need a partner in life, not a patient. Roger said it over meatloaf at the Cracker Barrel in Sikeston, then went back to signing a greeting card he had propped against the syrup caddy. He thought I had not seen it. What Roger did not know was that an hour earlier, while he was in the men’s room, I had already photographed the front of that card. And it was not for me.

I am 63. I have been married to Roger for 34 years. I raised our two kids, nursed his mother through her last year, and yes, I have put on some weight and my knees are not what they were. But back when we were first married in that drafty little apartment over on 4th Street, Roger used to tell me he loved every single curve of me. He used to hold my hand while we walked down to the diner just to get a slice of pie. People change, I suppose, or maybe they just drop the act once they think you have nowhere else to go.

He had been different for months. Quiet in the wrong way. New cologne that smelled like department store cedar. His phone face-down on the table like a card he did not want me to see. I told myself I was being silly.

I told myself thirty-four years does not just evaporate because a man gets a little gray at the temples and starts worrying about how old he looks.

That night at dinner he had brought a card in a gift shop bag and set it beside his plate. When he got up to wash his hands, I did something I had never done in 34 years of marriage. I slid it out far enough to see the front, and I took a picture with my phone. It was an anniversary card. Not the funny kind. The romantic kind, foil hearts, To the one who changed everything. Our anniversary is in October. This was March.

I put it back exactly as it was and folded my hands and waited.

He came back, sat down, and started signing it right there in front of me like I was furniture. That is when he told me I had let myself go and needed to try harder if I wanted to keep a man interested at our age.

I did not cry into the meatloaf. I said, You are probably right, Roger, and I asked the waitress for more coffee. My hands were steady. That surprised me. I had expected to shake. Because here is what Roger had forgotten across 34 years of me handling every bill, every tax return, every insurance form while he did not have a head for it.

I know money. I have always known our money. And for the last few months the numbers had stopped adding up. A card charge in Cape Girardeau twice a month. A utility auto-pay to an address that was not ours. Small enough that a man who never balances a checkbook would never notice I had noticed.

I had told myself I was imagining it. Now I had a foil-hearted card that said I was not.

The twist that turned my stomach cold: two days before, he had asked me to co-sign refinancing the house to lower our payment.

I had almost done it. I had had the pen in my hand. He had given me some line about interest rates dropping and needing to secure our retirement. If I had signed that paper, the equity we built together would have been tied up in a line of credit he could tap without my permission.

Three weeks earlier, I had noticed the first strange withdrawal. Just twelve hundred dollars. Then two thousand. I brushed it off as some truck repair or parts for his woodworking shop out back. But bills do not lie. People lie. Numbers just sit there and wait for someone to read them.

The morning of that dinner in Sikeston, I had driven twenty miles into town under the pretense of picking up a prescription. Instead, I parked three blocks away from a brick office building and walked inside to talk to a woman named Diane who specialized in family law. I did not hire her then. I just sat in her stiff leather chair and asked what happened to marital assets when a husband started spending them on someone else.

She told me things I did not want to hear. She told me about dissipation of assets. She told me about freezing accounts before the ink dried on refinancing papers. I remember looking at her desk plant, a drooping pothos that needed water, and thinking that my whole life looked just like that. Neglected at the roots.

I drove us home from the Cracker Barrel. Roger fell asleep in his recliner by 9, snoring softly with his mouth open, looking every bit of his sixty-five years. He had no idea. He thought he was the smart one.

I went to the kitchen, sat at the table where I have paid our bills for three decades, and pulled up the photo of that card. Next to it, I opened the bank app. And next to that, I pulled up the sticky note with Diane’s direct office number from that morning.

I looked at all three for a long time. The house was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator.

Then I picked up my phone and tapped Diane’s number. It was time to stop asking hypothetical questions.