Chapter 2
Two
It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m on the living room couch in a state of such unusual calm that I’m afraid to move in case I break the spell.
Maisie is asleep in her bassinet by the window, her tiny chest rising and falling with each peaceful breath.
Milo, after forty-three minutes of increasingly desperate negotiation involving three different pacifiers, a vibrating chair, and a complete reenactment of The Very Hungry Caterpillar with sound effects, has finally surrendered to exhaustion on my chest. And outside, the steady drone of the lawn mower tells me Daniel is making himself useful while I finally get a minute to myself.
I should be reading. That’s what I told myself I’d do with these precious twenty minutes, pick up the paperback I’ve been trying to finish since the twins were born, a book with so many dog-eared pages it looks like it survived some kind of natural disaster.
Or maybe I should just close my eyes and not do anything at all, which is always the right answer but somehow the hardest one to choose.
Instead, I spot Daniel’s phone on the coffee table.
It’s a thoughtless, practical impulse. We’re running low on nappy sacks, the disposable kind that make the whole disgusting process of twin diaper changes slightly less likely to result in biohazard exposure.
Daniel gets triple points on his shopping app for household purchases, some complicated rewards program he signed up for back when we were still making coherent choices about our lives, and I’ve ordered through his account before.
No big deal. I’ll have them ordered in under a minute and then I’ll have earned myself at least seventeen more minutes of staring into space before one of the babies decides that naptime is over.
I move carefully, sliding one hand under Milo’s back while keeping him pressed against my chest with the other. He stirs slightly, his tiny face scrunching, but doesn’t wake. Slowly, I reach for the phone with my free hand, stretching just far enough that my fingertips brush the edge of the case.
Got it.
The phone lights up under my touch, the lock screen showing a picture I took last month, Daniel on the floor, Maisie on his chest, both of them looking up at the camera with identical expressions of surprise.
They have the same nose. The same small crease between their eyebrows when they’re thinking hard about something.
I position the phone so it can see my face, and it unlocks instantly, facial recognition, same as mine.
Daniel set it up when I was still pregnant, his arm around my waist as he held the phone between us, both our faces filling the tiny frame.
“Now we can both get in,” he’d said, his chin resting on top of my head.
“In case of emergencies.” At the time, it had seemed like a gesture of intimacy, of trust. Now it just feels practical.
A small decision that makes life with newborn twins slightly less impossible to navigate.
The shopping app is right there on the home screen. My thumb is already moving toward it, scrolling through the last few purchases (formula, baby wipes, a twelve-pack of energy drinks, clearly Daniel’s doing), when a notification slides across the top of the screen.
The username is unfamiliar: JazzyGirl847.
The preview text: “So when can I see you again? I’ve been thinking about that thing you did with your… “
There’s a photo attached. Just a thumbnail, but it’s enough. A woman’s body. Unmistakably not mine.
I go completely still.
The lawn mower hums steadily outside, a distant mechanical sound that suddenly seems too loud and too quiet all at once.
I can hear my own heartbeat in my ears, a thick, insistent rhythm that doesn’t match the steady click of the kitchen clock or the soft rustle of the curtains when the air conditioning kicks on.
I read the notification again. Then again. Each time, the words seem to change slightly, as if to make sure, I’ve gotten the message.
JazzyGirl847. The thing you did with your…
My thumb moves before I’ve decided to move it, tapping on the notification. The screen flashes, and suddenly I’m in Snapchat, an app I did not know Daniel had, or at least an app I thought he’d stopped using back in college, when we were still figuring out who we were to each other.
The full message thread opens.
It’s worse than I thought. Much worse.
There’s only one message visible, but it’s enough.
More than enough. The photo is still there, the kind that makes my stomach drop somewhere below my knees, and below it, her most recent message sitting in the chat like it’s perfectly normal, like it’s fine, like this is just how people talk to my husband.
The lawn mower keeps going outside, seemingly disconnected from the room I’m sitting in, from the phone in my hand, from the sudden absence of air in my lungs.
I don’t move. I don’t cry. I don’t throw the phone across the room or scream or do any of the things I’ve seen women do in movies when they find out their husbands have been unfaithful.
Instead, I sit perfectly still, Milo’s warm weight against my chest the only thing keeping me anchored to the world and watch as the evidence of my husband’s betrayal stays on the screen.
“So, when can I see you again? I’ve been thinking about that thing you did with your tongue last night.”
Last night? He was at the gym…
It’s not shock, really. It’s not even surprise, though God knows I should be surprised.
It’s a type of stillness that reminds me of standing at the edge of a frozen pond as a child, listening to the crack beneath my feet and knowing, in that suspended moment before the fall, that everything has already changed.
My brain, usually so loud, so quick with a comment or a joke or a self-deprecating observation, goes completely quiet. There’s nothing to say. No joke to make. No observation that doesn’t taste like ashes in my mouth.
I don’t confront him. The thought doesn’t even cross my mind.
Instead, I keep sitting there, the phone in my hand suddenly feeling like it weighs twenty pounds, and I begin to look.
Not because I want to find more, I’ve already found more than enough, but because some distant, practical part of my brain has already started calculating how much I need to know before I can decide my next move.
I exit Snapchat, my thumb moving with a steadiness that surprises me, and check his regular messages.
Nothing there. Just the usual, work group chats, texts from his mom asking if we need anything, the thread between him and me that’s mostly logistics and baby updates these days.
I swipe to his call log. Nothing unusual there either, just incoming or outgoing calls to people I recognize, spread out over the past few weeks in a pattern that suggests nothing out of the ordinary.
His apps tell the same story. Email, calendar, weather, the shopping app I originally reached for. All of it perfectly, painfully normal. The phone of a man who has nothing to hide.
But I know what I saw. And more importantly, I know Daniel, know how his mind works, how he approaches problems. He’s always been the practical one, the one who thinks three steps ahead. If he’s going to hide something, he’s not going to leave it somewhere obvious.
My hands don’t shake as I open the browser on his phone.
They should, probably. I should be crying or at the very least not sitting here in stunned silence, but instead I’m typing “how to find hidden apps on Samsung Galaxy” into the search bar, watching as the results populate with exactly the information I need.
It’s surprisingly easy. A few swipes, a specific gesture on the home screen, and suddenly I’m looking at a folder I’ve never seen before.
A folder labelled “Utilities.” Of course it’s labelled Utilities.
Of course it is. Because Daniel has always had a gift for naming things to hide what they really are.
I used to find it endearing when he called the toaster a ‘bread pop.’ Now it just makes me feel sick.
Inside the folder are three apps. Two messaging platforms I don’t recognize, not WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or anything I’ve ever used, and one with a small flame icon that I don’t have to open to know is some kind of hookup app.
I open them one by one, working my way through with the methodical focus of someone defusing a bomb. And it’s all there, the full, documented history of my husband’s betrayal, laid out in timestamps and usernames and explicit photos that make my stomach turn.
He started seven months ago from what I can see.
When I was almost eight months pregnant with the twins, my body so swollen and uncomfortable that getting off the couch required both hands and a running start.
When I was in so much pain from the pressure on my sciatic nerve that I cried every time I stood up.
When he stopped touching me because, he said, he was “worried about hurting me or the babies.”
Turns out he was just worried about finding someone who didn’t waddle.
There are multiple women. At least three, including the one from the snapchat message, JazzyGirl (Jasmine, I confirm from one message where she mentions her full name), someone who goes by Lexi, and a third who uses her full name, Victoria, which feels almost courteous given the circumstances.
They all know about me. Not by name, but by circumstance, “my pregnant wife,” “the twins’ mom,” “things at home.” They know he’s married.
They know about the babies. And they don’t care.
Or worse, they care just the right amount, enough to ask how he’s holding up, enough to offer support and understanding and very enthusiastic sex, but not enough to make him feel guilty about any of it.