The deceived lover is always a detective. Once you suspect your partner has been unfaithful, everything becomes evidence of her infidelity: when she arrives home, what she wears, even the way she washes dishes. Suspicion charges and changes formerly prosaic objects and gestures; the ephemeral trash of our daily existence takes on true weight. And because anything could be the thing that tells the truth—the hard piece of the world that transforms idea into fact—everything is worthy of attention. But doubt and distrust provide certain pleasures, ones that are as powerful as they are perverse. These satisfactions are the reason we remain so long with the people who betray us: Under investigation, our dull, daily routines become, for once, the stuff of intrigue. We are, at last, alive to our own lives.

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