Different people can have dramatically different reactions to identical things. Totally insane, right?
Smoke usually means fire yes, but not always - could be someone heating oil on a pan.
I'm certainly on board with the belief asbestos increases likelihood of cancer. But so does driving through a dirty tunnel in peak hour traffic every day of your life. Quantifying which one were more likely to 'cause' your cancer is a not a straighforward thing.
I’ve heard of a number of these cases of wives of construction workers contracting these asbestos related diseases, it’s a population that had a higher chance of contracting them (just like construction workers themselves exposed to asbestos, of which there were many in this country). As I understand it, none of this is disputed by any of the medical science, epidemiology or experts in those fields…
Since asbestos is still around in various (mostly old) materials, it is possible to have additional exposure unknowingly, but it’s quite rare to contract something like asbestosis or mesothelioma without known exposure.
So over a population you'd generally expect to see the incidence correlate to the level of exposure, but not in a way that precludes unusual shit like this.
Even if the husband took off his clothes, separately bagged them and then handed them to his wife to clean, it's hard to see how his exposure is less to the point where only she was diagnosed.