So I waited, telling myself I’d bring it up again when he was in a better mood, when he wasn’t tired from work.
The hotel receipts that changed everything I thought I knew
A week later, the television remote control died right in the middle of a show I was watching. I got up from the couch with an annoyed sigh and went to Troy’s desk in the corner of our living room to search for replacement batteries, which he always kept in the top drawer.
I opened the drawer and immediately found what I was looking for—but I also found something else.
A neat stack of hotel receipts, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, tucked carefully under some old mail and expired coupons.
Now, Troy did occasionally travel for work to the company’s West Coast office, so finding a hotel receipt or two wouldn’t have been particularly concerning. But as I picked up the stack with shaking hands, I saw that the hotel wasn’t in California where his company was located.
Every single receipt was for the same hotel in Massachusetts. A hotel I’d never heard him mention even once.
Every receipt was for the exact same room number. The dates on them went back months and months, maybe even longer.
I sat down heavily on the edge of our bed, staring at those receipts until my hands went completely numb and I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore.
I kept trying desperately to think of logical, innocent reasons for Troy to be traveling repeatedly to Massachusetts without telling me about it, and I kept coming up absolutely empty. We didn’t know anyone in Massachusetts. He had no family there. His company had no office there.
I counted them carefully, laying them out on the bedspread. Eleven receipts total. Eleven separate trips he’d somehow lied about or hidden from me.
