Every Night He Left. She Finally Followed Him.

Denise followed them.

Her hands were so wet on the steering wheel she had to wipe them on her jeans at the red lights. She stayed two cars back, the way people do in movies. She didn't know where they were going. She didn't want to know. She had to know.

Back onto the highway. Off at the medical center exit. Through the gates of a big hospital with a red EMERGENCY sign lit up out front.

Terrell pulled into the drop-off circle by the main entrance.

The young woman got out of the back seat with her little suitcase. She leaned down to the driver's window and said something. She laughed. Then she walked into the hospital through the sliding doors, and she didn't look back.

Terrell sat there in the circle for a second, typing on his phone. Then he pulled away.

Denise didn't understand.

She sat in the parking lot with her car still running, staring at the hospital doors. A nurse. A nurse, going to work. In the back seat. Not the front. In the back.

Then she looked at Terrell's car as it turned out of the circle. And under the streetlight, for the first time, she saw it. A small sticker in the corner of his back window. A little blue car.

The app on his phone.

He was driving people. For money.

She caught up with him at a gas station two miles away. He was standing at the pump when she pulled in right next to him, too fast. He looked up and saw her and his face went through about five different things.

Then it settled on one. Shame.

"You followed me," he said.

"What is this, Terrell?" She got out of the car. Robe, jeans, house shoes. She didn't care. "What are you doing?"

He looked at the pump. The numbers ticking up.

"I'm driving," he said. "Ten at night to four in the morning. Airport runs, mostly. Nurses. People with early flights. Drunk people from downtown." He laughed without any sound. "Somebody threw up in the back seat last Thursday."

"Why?"

"Because I got laid off, Denise."

The words hung there in the gas station light.

"Seven weeks ago," he said. "They cut the whole department. Eleven of us. They gave us two weeks of severance and a box for our stuff."

"Seven weeks?" She couldn't breathe. "You've been going to work every morning..."

"I've been going to the library every morning. Applying for jobs. Fourteen applications. Two interviews. Nothing." He hung up the pump nozzle. His hands were shaking. "And then I've been driving all night so the mortgage goes through on the first, so you never see a single number change in that account."

Denise leaned back against her car. Her legs didn't feel right.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Terrell looked at her then. Really looked.

"Because three weeks ago, at your mama's table, you told your whole family that if your husband made real money, you'd have a real kitchen." His voice cracked. "And everybody laughed. And I'd already been laid off for a month. And I sat there and thought, if she says that when I have a job, what is she gonna say when I don't?"

She put her hand over her mouth.

"So I didn't tell you," Terrell said. "I just went to work. A different kind. And I slept on the couch because I couldn't lie next to you and pretend I was okay."

"Terrell, I didn't mean it like..."

"You did, though." He said it gently, which was worse. "Not that night. But all the nights before it. The faucet. The car. The way you tell your sisters what I can't do. You've been talking about me like I'm a project you got stuck with for a long time, Dee. I just finally got tired."

Denise was crying hard now, at a gas station, at two in the morning, in her house shoes.

"I thought you were cheating," she said. "I thought you had another woman."

"I know you did," he said. "That's the other part."

He opened his car door. Then he stopped. He reached into the console, took something out, and held it out to her across the space between their cars.

A business card. Plain white, with a name and a phone number and an address on Peachtree Street.

Marcus Bell, Attorney at Law. Family and Divorce.

"I met with him two weeks ago," Terrell said quietly. "I haven't signed anything. But I went."

Denise stared at the card in her hand.

"That's what I meant," he said, "when I said maybe it's too late."

He got in his car. And this time, he didn't drive to the airport. He drove home. She followed him.

Neither one of them slept that night. He stayed on the couch. She sat on the stairs, where she could see him, and she held that business card until the corners went soft.