Page 3 of After Everything
He'd been with her that morning. And then he came home and kissed me.
My stomach lurched. I made it to the sink before I threw up.
When I was done, I rinsed my mouth and wiped my face with a dish towel. My hands were still shaking, but something in my brain clicked over. The same switch that flipped during a code in the ICU, when there wasn't time to feel, only time to act.
I had to pull it together. Had to think.
I went back to the laptop.
The clinical detachment felt familiar. Comforting, even. This was just triage. Assessment. Documentation. I'd done this a thousand times.
I checked other messaging apps, wondering if anything had synced over. His account was logged into WhatsApp, but there was nothing there. He'd been careful to erase the messages. But, of course, he'd forgotten about iCloud backup.
He'd been careful. Just not careful enough.
I found the credit card we'd opened two years ago and never used. Except David hadbeen using it. Hotels. Restaurants. Lingerie purchased in a size that wasn't mine. Five months of charges.
His location history told me the rest. The same hotel, over and over. An address in the city I didn't recognize. Every pin matched a night I'd been working.
I screenshot everything and emailed it to myself.
Then I closed the laptop.
The kitchen came back into focus slowly. The shattered wine glass on the floor. The dark red stain spreading across the tile like blood. My hands were shaking again; they had been shaking the whole time, I realized. I'd just been too focused to notice.
My heart was racing. Pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat, in my temples, behind my eyes. The tunnel vision I'd had while documenting everything started to widen, letting the reality creep in at the edges.
David was cheating on me.
Not a one-time mistake. Not a drunken kiss at a work event. A full-blown affair.Five months, at least. Maybe longer. With Sarah, his beautiful, successful, daughter-of-a-founding-partner college friend. In hotels. In her bed. While I worked twelve-hour shifts and came home to an empty house because he was too busy building his career (our future, he always said) to even have dinner with me.
I sat down at the kitchen island. The broken glass crunched under my feet.
The clock on the microwave said 11:47 PM.
David would be home soon. Another hour, he'd said. That meant midnight, maybe 12:30 if I was lucky. He'd walk through the door with his briefcase and his tired smile, kiss me on the forehead, ask about my shift. Like he always did. Like nothing was wrong.
I pulled out my phone and opened my email. The screenshots were all there, waiting. I had evidence. Proof. Everything I needed.
I thought about what came next. The conversation we'd have. The crying, the apologies, the excuses. Him telling me it meant nothing, that he loved me, that he'dend it. Me having to decide whether to believe him. Whether to try to fix this.
Whether I even wanted to.
Or maybe… maybe it wouldn’t be like that. Maybe he’d be happy he’d been caught. Maybe that’d give him the opportunity to leave and be with Sarah. Was he that kind of man? A coward?
I looked around our kitchen. At the plate I'd made him, now in the trash. The wine stain spreading across the floor. The broken glass I hadn't bothered to clean up. Eight years of my life in this house, with this man, building this future.
I'd given up med school for him. Moved across the country. Put my career on hold while he built his. And he'd repaid me by fucking his college friend in hotels I was helping pay for.
I stood up. Walked to our bedroom. Pulled his suitcase out of the closet and threw it on the bed.
Then I started packing his things.
CHAPTER 2: EMMA
Iheard his car in the driveway at 12:17 AM.
The suitcase sat by the front door, zipped and ready. His work suits. Enough shirts and pants for a week. Toiletries from the bathroom. I'd packed methodically, efficiently, the same way I'd document a patient chart. Everything he'd need.
