The morning I cut open our mattress, I was braced for something small and humiliating.

Maybe a forgotten gym bag.

A dead mouse.

Old takeout shoved where I had never thought to look.

What burst out instead was a sour, wet, rotten smell so violent it made my eyes water and my knees buckle before I had even peeled the fabric back all the way.

For three months that odor had haunted our bedroom.

It lived on Miguel’s side of the bed and seemed to wake up the moment his body hit the mattress each night, as if his weight pressed the stink up through the foam and into the room.

I had washed sheets until my hands cracked, soaked pillows in vinegar, sprayed perfume into the curtains, dragged the mattress into the Arizona sun, and still every night it came back.

Miguel kept telling me there was no smell.

Sometimes he laughed it off.

Sometimes he rolled over and told me I was too sensitive.

And sometimes, especially when I reached for the fitted sheet on his side, his face changed in a way I barely recognized.

One night he actually shouted at me for trying to strip the bed.

Leave it alone, he said, sharp and angry, with a look that froze me in place.

In eight years of marriage I had never seen that look before, but once it appeared, I couldn’t stop seeing it.

So when he left for Dallas on another business trip, I waited until his car turned off our street, dragged the mattress into the middle of the room, and cut straight into the seam.

Beneath the foam was a hollowed-out pocket and inside it a damp plastic bag speckled with mold, tied shut with gray duct tape.

I tore it open with shaking hands.

At the top was a little pink blanket, still wet in places and smelling of mildew and old milk.

Beneath it sat a tiny sweater, a stuffed rabbit, one child-sized sneaker, and a hospital bracelet so small it looked unreal in my palm.

Then I saw the photographs.

Miguel kneeling beside a little girl with dark curls.

Miguel carrying her on his shoulders in front of a playground.

Miguel with his arm around a woman I had never seen, both of them smiling in that soft, private way people smile when the photographer is someone they love.

In the last picture, the woman stood beside him in front of a low brick apartment building in Dallas.

The little girl was between them, gripping both of their hands.

They did not look like strangers.

They did not look temporary.

They looked like a family.

At the very bottom of the bag, wrapped in one of Miguel’s old T-shirts, was a second phone.

It was dead.

I crawled to the outlet, plugged it in, and sat cross-legged on the bedroom floor staring at the black screen as if my life depended on whether it stayed dark.

It didn’t.

When the phone powered on, the lock screen lit up with Miguel kissing the woman from the photographs while the little girl reached down from his shoulders to touch his hair.

A dozen notifications flooded in before I could even breathe.

The messages stacked one after another.

Luna has a fever again.