I wonder if my wife will ever find out. I'm meticulous, almost surgical, in my cleanup. I always use the "incognito" browser, clear the history on my phone and laptop, and delete the text threads from my burner app the moment they're read. I know the exact sound the garage door makes when it opens, giving me a twelve-second window to close tabs and compose my face. But the thought lingers, a cold knot in my stomach, especially when I'm lying next to her at night.

She's so trusting. She'll ask me how my day was while the faint, phantom scent of another woman's perfume still clings to my collar, a secret I can still smell. Last week, she was doing laundry and held up a pair of my boxers, a tiny, almost invisible lace thread from a pair of panties snagged on the seam. My heart stopped. But she just frowned, picked at it with her nail, and tossed them in the wash without a word. The relief was so potent it felt like a drug.

But it's the close calls that feed the paranoia. The hiccup in my alibi that I have to smooth over with a frantic, plausible lie. The time I came home and she'd used my laptop to look up a recipe, and my browser history, which I thought I'd wiped, had one lone, damning search term left in the autocomplete: "cheap motels near downtown." I played it off as looking for a place for my "uncle" to stay, and she bought it. But her eyes lingered on mine for a second too long.

What would she do if she knew? If she found the hidden folder on my phone, not named anything obvious like "affair," but something mundane like "golf photos," filled with pictures of me grinning next to a woman who isn't her? If she saw the videos, the ones that show a version of me she's never even met, one who is selfish, raw, and utterly debauched? I imagine the scene—the shattering of her world, the collapse of the life we've built. And in my darkest, most shameful moments, the thought of that destruction, of the total, catastrophic reveal, gives me a thrill so potent it's almost better than the secret itself.