I work from home. I work at the kitchen table, on the couch, occasionally at the coffee shop two blocks away. I take calls in the second bedroom we turned into an office. I travel maybe four days a month for on-site visits. I wear regular clothes most of the time. I do not have a physical office. I do not have a commute. I do not look, from the outside, like someone who is working in any obvious way.
This is a thing Daniel’s family had access to as a talking point, and someone used it.
## How the Story Got Established
I did not find out all at once. I found out in pieces, the way you find out most things that have been going on for a while.
The first piece: Marian’s birthday dinner eleven months into the consultancy. I had met Marian a handful of times since Daniel and I married three years ago, always at her house in Columbus, always with Daniel’s sister Beth and her husband Tom and their two kids. Marian is sixty-four, retired from school administration, organized and warm in a slightly formal way. She had always been pleasant to me. At the birthday dinner she pulled me aside in the kitchen while I was helping with plates and asked, quietly, whether things were going all right.
“Things are great,” I said.
“Daniel mentioned you’ve been having a hard time finding something,” she said. She said it gently, the way you’d tell someone their slip was showing.