Chapter 3 The Message
It happens on a Sunday morning.
Blake is in the shower and his phone is on the nightstand.
He usually takes it with him. He keeps it in his hand or his pocket or on whatever surface is closest to him at all times.
He scrolls while he's eating and while he's watching TV and while he's lying in bed waiting to fall asleep.
But today he left it plugged in on his side of the bed when he got up and walked to the bathroom without it.
I'm still in bed. I'm awake but I haven't moved yet because Sundays are the one day I don't have to be anywhere and I protect that laziness.
The sheets are warm and the apartment is quiet except for the sound of the shower running through the wall and Blake singing something off-key that I can't identify.
His phone lights up.
The screen glows with a notification and then goes dark again.
I don't move. I'm not the kind of person who reads other people's messages.
I've never gone through Blake's phone. Not once in six years.
I've always told myself that if you have to check your partner's phone then the relationship is already broken. Either you trust them or you don't.
But the screen lights up again. And again. Three messages in a row, each one pushing a new notification to the lock screen.
I stare at the phone. It's on Blake's nightstand, angled toward me because of where the charging cable pulls it. I can see the screen clearly from where I'm lying. I don't have to move. I don't have to reach for it. I just have to open my eyes and look.
I tell myself not to.
I look.
The messages are from Hailey.
I can see the preview text without unlocking the phone. The first few lines of each message are right there on the lock screen.
The first message says she had such a great time the other night and she keeps thinking about it and she wishes they could have stayed longer.
The second says she misses him. She asks when they can see each other again. She says the wait between visits is killing her.
The third is more personal. She tells him she can't stop thinking about the way he touched her. She says she's been distracted all weekend because of it. She says she wants him.
I read them once. Then I read them again. Then a third time because my brain is rejecting what my eyes are seeing.
These are not the messages you send to a friend's fiancé.
These are not the words someone uses when they're asking for work advice about a difficult boss.
These are the messages you send to someone you're sleeping with.
Someone you've been intimate with. Someone you're involved with in a way that has nothing to do with friendship or advice or anything else that would explain why Hailey Simpson's name is on my fiancé's phone at nine o'clock on a Sunday morning.
I sit up slowly. The shower is still running.
Blake is still singing. He has no idea. He is ten feet away behind a door, completely unaware that I am sitting in his bed reading messages from a woman I've known since high school.
A woman who hugged me last week. A woman who sat next to me on Ronnie's couch and asked about wedding planning.
A woman who looked me in the face and smiled and laughed and acted like nothing in the world was wrong.
My hands are shaking. Not a little. They're shaking enough that I notice it when I try to grip the edge of the blanket. My heartbeat is loud in my ears. There's a tightness in my chest that makes breathing feel like work. My stomach is rolling and I think I might throw up.
I get out of bed and walk to the kitchen.
I grip the edge of the counter and I breathe.
I count to ten. Then I count to ten again.
The kitchen looks the same as it always looks.
The dishes from last night are in the drying rack.
Blake's coffee mug from yesterday is still on the counter because he never puts it in the sink.
The light through the window is pale and ordinary and nothing about this room acknowledges that my entire life just changed in the time it took to read three text messages.
The shower turns off. I hear Blake moving around in the bathroom. The door opens and he comes out with a towel around his waist and his hair pushed back and water on his shoulders.
"Morning," he says. "You want to go get breakfast somewhere? I could go for some eggs."
I look at him. He's standing in the hallway smiling at me. His brown eyes are soft. His voice is easy. He looks exactly the way he always looks on a Sunday morning when the world is simple and quiet and everything is fine.
"Sure," I say. "That sounds good."
My voice doesn't break. My face doesn't change. I give him the same answer I would have given twenty minutes ago before his phone lit up and I am amazed at how normal it sounds.
We go to breakfast. We sit in a booth at Mel's Diner on Route 4 and we order eggs and toast and coffee.
The diner is half-full with the usual Sunday crowd.
An older couple sharing a newspaper. A family with two small kids making a mess with pancakes.
A group of men in hunting vests at the counter talking loudly about deer season.
The waitress knows us. Her name is Paula and she's worked here since we started coming in three years ago. She brings Blake's coffee without him asking because he always gets the same thing. She calls me "hon" and asks how things are at the salon. Normal. Everything is aggressively normal.
Blake is in a good mood. He talks about a project coming up at work.
A new residential development on the south side that Premiere Builders might bid on.
He says if they get the contract it could mean overtime through the fall and he could finally catch up on the house fund.
He says this casually. He says it like I should be encouraged.
He asks what I want to do tonight. He suggests maybe we order Chinese and watch a movie.
He reaches across the table at one point and squeezes my hand and tells me he's glad we came out.
I squeeze back. I smile. I eat my eggs and drink my coffee and I wonder how he can sit across from me so comfortably.
How he can hold my hand and talk about catching up on savings and plan our evening together while Hailey's messages are sitting on his phone.
Does it bother him? Does he think about it?
Or has he compartmentalized everything so completely that sitting in a diner with his fiancée is simply a different category from whatever he does with Hailey?
I am holding myself together with nothing but the understanding that if I fall apart right now in this diner I will never get the full truth.
Because the messages were bad. They confirmed something I've been afraid of for weeks.
They told me that Hailey has feelings for Blake and that something physical has happened between them.
But they weren't complete. They didn't tell me how long it's been going on.
They didn't tell me how many times. They didn't give me the full picture.
I need the full picture before I say a word.
I know how Blake works. If I confront him now with only three messages he'll minimize it.
He'll say Hailey was being dramatic. He'll say it was a one-time mistake.
He'll say she kissed him at a bar and he pushed her away and she's been reading into it ever since.
He'll have a story ready because Blake always has a story ready and his stories are always just believable enough to make me doubt myself.
Not this time. This time I'm going to have everything. Dates. Messages. Proof. Enough that he can't talk his way out of it. Enough that his stories won't matter.
After breakfast Blake drops me off at the apartment and says he's going to help Ronnie move some furniture. I tell him that's fine. I watch his truck pull out of the parking lot and I stand in the kitchen alone for a very long time.
I think about calling Raina. My older sister would drive down in twenty minutes and sit at this counter and help me figure out what to do. She's always been the stronger one. The more decisive one. The one who doesn't let emotion keep her from acting when action is needed.
But I'm not ready to say it out loud yet. Saying it out loud to another person makes it real. Right now the messages exist in a space between suspicion and certainty where I can still breathe. The moment I tell another person what I saw, that space closes.
Instead I decide to do something that will either confirm my worst fear or put it to rest.
I'm going to test Hailey. And then I'm going to test Blake.
I'm going to bring up communication between the two of them and see what each of them says.
If their stories match then maybe, somehow, I've misunderstood something.
And if their stories don't match then I'll know that both of them are lying to me.
Two days later I get my chance. Sierra organizes a last-minute coffee run after work. She texts me and Hailey and Alana and asks if anyone wants to meet at the new place downtown. I say yes immediately. Alana can't make it. Hailey says she'll be there.
I get to the coffee shop first. It's the place Sierra mentioned the other week, the one that opened in the old dry cleaner's space.
The coffee is mediocre but the muffins are decent and the tables are far enough apart that you can have a conversation without three other people overhearing it.
I order a latte and sit near the window and wait.
Sierra arrives next. She's still in her work clothes and she starts complaining about her boss before she even pulls out her chair.
Sierra works at a medical supply company and her boss Gerald has apparently never heard of email.
He delivers every instruction in person while standing uncomfortably close to people's desks.