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I watched them out of the corner of my eye as I chatted with my friends. I couldn't explain why, but something about the way they interacted gave me pause. Darrell was new to the group. We'd only known him a few weeks. He had just moved into our neighborhood, and he seemed like a nice enough guy. He was a single father, and his kids were the same ages as ours, but Cristina seemed friendlier and almost uncharacteristically flirtatious with him. Her smile seemed more genuine, and her eyes lingered on his a bit longer than normal. I told myself that I was being paranoid. He was a good-looking man. He was tall and fairly fit. Like most men in his late forties, he had a slight belly, but he wasn't her type.

Cristina was a southern girl. She'd been raised in a small town outside of Macon, Georgia, and Darrell was a black man from the suburbs north of Detroit. He had been emphatic that he wasn't from the city. He was a country boy. He liked country music, guns, and he drove a Ford F250 pickup. He and I should have gotten along better. He rode a Harley like me, but as soon as he learned that I was Christina's husband, his demeanor changed, as if I were his adversary, his competition. That irked me, but I trusted my wife. She'd never given me reason not to.

"Stop, dude," my friend Mark said softly as he nudged me in the ribs. "He's a good dude."

"What?" I lied, pretending that I wasn't watching them, and he shook his head. He thought I didn't like Darrell because he was black. He assumed that because I'd spent my teenage years in Georgia, I was racist, but my formative years, until my sophomore year in high school, had been in the northeast. I was a Yankee but not a New York Yankee. I spent the first 14 years of my life in and around Boston. I'd had plenty of black friends. I'd played baseball and football with black guys. I judged people on character, not skin.

I rejoined the discussion and tried to focus on my buddies. I accepted a fresh glass of bourbon, two fingers, neat. I joked about the upcoming football season, and for a few minutes, I forgot about that feeling I had moments earlier. Then I glanced at them again, and that hinky feeling returned.

Cristina brushed her hair from her face and looked up at him with an undeniable sparkle in her golden brown eyes. Her eyelashes batted several times, and her smile widened. She shifted nervously and bit lightly on her lip. Then she laughed. It was an animated laugh—the kind of laugh she'd had with me when we were young and our love was fresh and exciting.

Cristina and I met in college. She'd been raised religious. Her parents were God-fearing southern Baptists, and they'd passed that on to their daughters. She attended church, even in college, and she was a 21-year-old virgin when we met. I'd been raised Protestant-adjacent. I believed in God, but I wasn't spiritual. I'd had sex with a half dozen girls before I met her. She'd been a gorgeous honey blonde with a petite athletic body and big breasts. We were in a business class together. I took one look, and I was smitten. We became friends. We hung out a lot before we started dating. We had chemistry, but she made me wait. She was worth it. It was a year before we had sex. We'd already graduated by then. I'd been looking at rings. She was my person, and she got pregnant the first time we had sex. She laughed and said it was proof that God was real. We got married before she started to show. We had a small ceremony with her preacher and close family and friends. The reception was at the Knights of Columbus lodge, and my college baseball teammate Ricky was the best man.

I looked at them again, and my stomach churned. His hand brushed the hair from her face. It was intimate and familiar. She was still beautiful. Her hair was still honey blonde, but now it came from a bottle to hide the grays. Her face was slightly rounder than it had been in college, with a few wrinkles and laugh lines, but she still passed for ten years younger than the 49 on her driver's license. Her body was thicker and more curvaceous than it had been before kids, but it was sexy, and she'd dressed more provocatively in the last five years than she ever had.

I shook my head and told myself that I was being stupid. She'd never given me any reason not to trust her. She was loyal, and we were still

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