2. Melody
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Melody
The suite is the most beautiful room I have ever stood in, and I am trying with everything in me to feel it.
Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the Andaman Sea, the water going gold at the edges where the sun touches it, then bleeding into pink like the sky can’t decide what color grief is supposed to be.
There’s a bottle of champagne sweating in a silver bucket with a little card that says Congratulations to the happy couple, and a bed the size of my old apartment covered in rose petals shaped into a heart.
Someone spent an hour arranging those petals. Someone believed in this.
“Told you the upgrade was worth it,” Leo says, dropping his bag by the door like it’s any door, like we’re checking into a Holiday Inn off the highway.
“It’s perfect.”
“You’re doing the thing where you say perfect and look like someone died.”
I press my palm flat against the cold glass. The window is cool despite the heat outside, and I focus on that, the contrast, something physical I can name. “I’m just tired. Twenty hours of travel. Give me a second to land.”
He comes up behind me and kisses the top of my head, quick, already moving past me toward the bathroom. “I’m gonna shower off the plane. Then dinner? There’s a place on the water, I saw it when we drove in. Looks nice.”
“Yeah. Water’s good.”
He peels his shirt over his head on the way to the bathroom, and I watch the door click shut, and I stand there waiting for the enormous feeling one more time.
The one everyone promised. The one that’s supposed to arrive on a honeymoon in a room like this with a man like that.
The shower kicks on. Steam starts curling under the door.
I should be in there with him. That’s what honeymoons are for, right?
Champagne in the shower, rose petals stuck to wet skin, the kind of reckless joy that doesn’t care about jet lag.
But my feet don’t move. My body doesn’t want to move.
And I tell myself it’s the exhaustion, the twenty hours in recycled air, the wedding hangover that hasn’t lifted yet.
I tell myself I’ll feel it tomorrow. I’ll feel everything tomorrow.
I climb onto the bed, careful not to disturb the heart-shaped petals, and prop myself against the headboard.
The book I packed is in my carry-on - some thriller Jessica recommended, the kind with short chapters and a body on the first page.
I find it and open to chapter one and read the first line and I read it again, because the words keep sliding off me like water.
My eyes move but my brain is somewhere else.
The phone is what pulls my eyes up.
It’s on the nightstand, plugged into the charger he set up the second we walked in, and the screen keeps lighting up. Once. Twice. A third time. I watch it glow and go dark, glow and go dark, like a heartbeat I’m not supposed to notice.
I’m not a woman who reads phones. I want that on the record.
Four years and I never once. I trusted him with everything - my time, my money, my body, my future.
I handed him the keys to my whole life and never once checked the locks.
But the screen is right there, facing up, glowing in a room going dark with the sunset, and a name lands across it like a slap.
Alexandra.
My hand moves without me.
The phone is warm from charging. I tap the screen and type the most obvious password ever, which is his birthdate.
Alexandra: How’s paradise? ??
I should stop. I should put it down. I should wait for him to come out and ask him who Alexandra is and give him the chance to explain.
I keep scrolling.
Leo: Miserable without you. She is making me crazy with all of her plans
Alexandra: lol poor baby. Married man problems ??
Leo: Don’t. You know who I actually want in that bed right now.
I keep scrolling and take three quick pictures with my phone and the room tilts. The bed, the petals, the champagne, the pink light on the water - all of it slides sideways and I’m gripping the phone so hard my knuckles go white. I should stop. I should stop reading. I cannot stop reading.
Alexandra: Yeah? And what would you be doing to me if I were there?
Leo: Don’t start. I’m already going crazy over here.
Alexandra: Then hurry home. I still have that thing you like.
Leo: You’re killing me. Counting the days.
Alexandra: I love you. Come back to me.
Leo: Always. Just a little more patience.
I love you. I love you. He told her he loves her. The words sit on the screen like they’ve always been there, like they’ve been living in his phone this whole time while I planned seating charts and picked flowers and wrote vows at two in the morning that made me cry.
I keep scrolling. Back further. Past the wedding. Past the rehearsal dinner. Past the engagement party where I stood in a white dress and smiled until my face hurt while everyone told me how lucky I was.
I photograph everything as I go. Every screen. My hands know what my brain hasn’t caught up to yet - that I’m going to need proof of this, that someday someone will try to tell me I imagined it.
Leo: When’s she leaving?
Alexandra: Soon?
Leo: Soon. Then it’s just us.
Alexandra: She’ll never know.
Leo: She’ll never know.
She’ll never know.
I’m shaking. I don’t realize I’m shaking until I watch my own hands tremble against the phone screen, and then I can’t stop noticing it, the way my whole body has started vibrating like something inside me is trying to get out.
The shower is still running. I can hear him humming in there, some song I don’t recognize, and I’m standing in my honeymoon suite reading my husband tell another woman she’ll never know while rose petals wilt on the bed behind me.
The water shuts off.
The door opens on a wall of steam and Leo comes out with a towel low on his hips, still damp, still grinning, still the easy handsome that never had to try.
His eyes land on the phone in my hand first. Then my face.
The grin vanishes.
“What are you doing with my phone?”
His voice is sharp. Not guilty. Not caught. Accusatory. Like I’m the one who did something wrong.
“Leo-”
“You know you never touch my phone. That’s - we agreed on that. Privacy. Remember? We talked about this.” He’s crossing the room now, water still dripping down his chest, hand already reaching. “Give it to me.”
“Who is Alexandra?”
He stops. Something flickers across his face - a calculation, quick and cold - and then it’s gone, replaced by confusion so convincing I almost believe it.
“What?”
“Alexandra. Who is she?”
“I don’t-” He shakes his head, brow furrowing. “What are you talking about?”
“The woman you’ve been texting. The one you told you love her. The one you said-” My voice cracks and I hate it. I hate that my voice is cracking while his stays steady. “You said she’d never know. About us. About me. Who is she, Leo?”
“Babe.” He takes another step toward me, hands up now, palms out, the universal gesture of innocence. “I think you’re confused. You’re exhausted, you haven’t slept in like two days, and you’re reading something out of context-”
“Out of context?” I hold up the phone. My hand is trembling but I don’t care anymore. “You told her you wish she was in this bed instead of me. What context makes that okay?”
“Can I just-” He reaches for the phone again. “Let me see what you’re looking at. I’m sure there’s an explanation.”
“Don’t.”
“Melody, come on. You’re being crazy right now.”
Crazy. I’ve heard him use that word before. About his ex. About his mother. About any woman who ever questioned him about anything. And now he’s using it on me, in our honeymoon suite, while I’m holding proof of his affair in my shaking hands.
“I’m not crazy.” My voice comes out quieter than I intend. “I read the messages, Leo. All of them. Going back months.”
“Whatever you think you read-”
“You told her you love her.”
“That’s not - I didn’t-” He stops. Regroups.
I can almost see him cycling through options, trying to find the angle that will work.
“Okay. Okay, listen. Alexandra is a coworker. We’re close.
Maybe too close, I can admit that. But it’s not what you’re thinking.
It’s just - we talk. We vent. Sometimes the language gets a little-”
“A little what? A little ‘I want you in my bed’? A little ‘I love you, come back to me’?”
“You’re twisting it.”
“I’m reading it. Word for word. Your words, Leo.”
He runs a hand through his wet hair, and for the first time, I see something crack in the performance. A flash of frustration. Of anger, even. Like I’m the one making this difficult.
“Fine.” His voice changes. Hardens. “Fine. You want to do this? You want to have this conversation right now, on our honeymoon, after everything we just-”
“You’re the one who was texting your girlfriend while I was asleep next to you.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Then what is she?”
Silence. He stares at me, jaw working, and I watch him try to find the lie that will fix this. The right combination of words that will make me doubt what I saw with my own eyes.
“She’s someone I talk to,” he finally says. “Someone who listens. Someone who doesn’t make me feel like everything I do is wrong.”
“I make you feel like everything you do is wrong?”
“You don’t even realize you do it, Mel. The lists.
The schedules. The way you have to control every single detail of every single thing.
Do you know what it’s been like, living with you for the past six months?
The wedding planning? I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t do anything right. Every conversation was another thing I forgot, another thing I screwed up, another disappointed look. ”
I stare at him. The audacity of it - the sheer, breathtaking audacity - leaves me speechless for a moment.
“So you cheated.”
“I didn’t cheat. I found someone to talk to. Someone who made me feel like a person instead of a project. I was just stressed with all this wedding planning.”
“You told her you love her.”
“People say things, Melody. In the moment. When they’re stressed and overwhelmed and-”