I’ve been the other woman for a man named Curt for almost two years, and I don’t expect any of you to feel sorry for me. I knew he was married from the very first week we started talking over by the free weights. I did it anyway. But last Tuesday a stranger stopped me while I was wiping down a machine, smiled like we were old friends, and said, “Tell Curt thanks for setting me up with Angela.” I didn’t know an Angela.

I froze right there with my gym towel in my hand. Because for twenty-four months, I thought I was the only one he was lying to his wife about.

Go ahead and judge. I’d judge me too if I was reading this on my phone over coffee. I’ve told myself a hundred versions of why our situation was different, and standing here now I can see they were all just lies I needed to keep myself warm at night. Curt told me his marriage was already over in every way that mattered. He said they lived in separate bedrooms, that they were only staying under the same roof for the kids, and that the paperwork was already sitting in a drawer somewhere. I believed him because I wanted to believe him, and wanting something badly enough is its own kind of choice.

The gym was our thing, funny enough, hidden right in plain sight over on Route 34.

We used it for cover so people from town wouldn’t put two and two together. I still go on Tuesday nights out of sheer muscle memory, even though the whole place makes my stomach turn now. I was on the treadmill by the front window watching the cars go by on the wet asphalt when a man I’d never laid eyes on slowed down beside my machine. He was an older guy with a gray crew cut and a friendly, open face that didn’t look like trouble. He said he recognized me from some pictures Curt had shown him down at the country club.

Then he dropped the sentence that cracked the whole foundation right out from under me. “Tell Curt thanks for setting me up with Angela. She’s great.” I said something automatic, some polite nothing about being glad to hear it, and kept my feet moving because my body just reacted before my brain could catch up.

But my legs had gone to absolute water underneath me. I had to grip the plastic handles just to keep from stumbling off the belt. I asked him, keeping my voice as level as I could manage, how exactly he knew Curt.

He wiped his forehead with a small towel and laughed. He said they played golf together every Thursday morning. He said Curt was always helping the guys out, setting people up with friends, and that Curt’s own girl Angela had a friend, and one thing just led to another at some weekend barbecue. Curt’s own girl. I have been Curt’s girl for two years. I spend my weekends waiting for his texts. I have never heard the name Angela mentioned a single time in my life.

I hit the stop button on the treadmill, walked straight into the locker room, and sat down in the last bathroom stall with my knees pulled up. I started doing the math in my head, and every date I thought I understood suddenly turned into a lie I hadn’t seen coming. The nights he couldn’t come over because of late inventory at his hardware supplier. The weekend trips for corporate software training in Peoria. The times he swore the kids needed him to coach soccer in the rain. I’d built a whole complicated story in my head where I was the exception, the real one, the woman he was actually building a life with once the dust settled.

I wasn’t the exception at all. I was just one car in a very busy rotation. There’s a wife at home, there’s me in my rented townhouse, there’s Angela somewhere across town, and God only knows how many golf buddies got a referral from him over a bucket of range balls. And the worst part, the part that makes me sick to my stomach to type out loud, is that even suspecting bits and pieces of it before Tuesday, I probably would have kept going. I wanted him more than I wanted the truth about him, and that makes me just as pathetic as him.

So don’t feel sorry for me. I did this. I chose this life, over and over, with my eyes half open and pretending the shadows were just shadows. But there’s a woman sitting in a house on the north side of town who chose none of it, and I keep thinking about her face when she eventually finds out what kind of man she married. I left my gym bag in the locker and walked right out into the damp evening air without looking back.

I’m sitting in my car in the gym parking lot right now with the heater running low. Curt’s name just lit up my dashboard screen for the third time in ten minutes. My thumb is hovering over the glass, and I know exactly what I’m going to do before I answer him. I spent the last two hours forwarding every screenshot, every hotel receipt, and every late-night text he ever sent me straight to his wife’s email inbox, along with Angela’s full name and the number of the man from the golf course. I don’t feel clean about any of it, and I know I’m no hero in this mess. When she answers his call in a minute, she’s going to find out her husband is a stranger, and I’m going to change my number before he even realizes the floor has dropped out from under him.