I remember the sound – sharp, final, like a verdict being delivered. My hand was trembling as I opened the bedroom door. The hinges whispered as if the house itself begged me to stop.
But I didn’t. Warm air hi:t me – his cologne mixed with something floral. Her perfume.
The same one I’d complimented weeks ago at brunch. “What a lovely scent,” I’d said, smiling across the table at my daughter’s best friend. The sunlight poured into the room, golden and cruel.
That’s when I saw them — my husband, Logan, forty-six, the man I’d loved for nineteen years, and Madison, twenty-four, my daughter Marlene’s closest friend. They were tangled in the sheets I’d ironed that morning. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
My mind tried to twist what I saw into something innocent, something explainable. But then Madison turned her head and smiled. A slow, deliberate curve of her lips.
It wasn’t shame or fear. It was triumph. Logan froze when he saw me.
Guilt flickered across his face — then calculation. “Claire,” he said, as if my name could undo what I’d witnessed. I stepped back.
He called my name again, scrambling for excuses. I shut the door softly and walked downstairs, every step heavy, unreal. My body shook as if my bones no longer believed in gravity.
When I reached the kitchen, everything looked painfully normal — sunlight, coffee cups, my grocery list on the fridge. Then footsteps came down the stairs. “Claire,” Logan said, his voice cracking.
“Please, let me explain.”
“Explain?” The word was dust in my mouth. “You think?” My voice sounded foreign, sharp. “I’m sorry you had to find out this way,” she said.
This way. Not sorry for what she’d done – only sorry I’d seen it. “Leave my house,” I said.
She turned to go, then paused. “Marlene doesn’t have to know.”
“How kind of you,” I said coldly, “to think of my daughter now.”
Her mask cracked for a split second before she walked out. Then it was just Logan and me.
Two strangers surrounded by the ruins of a marriage. “How long?” I asked. He hesitated.
“Three months.”
Three months of lies. Three months of him coming home to me, pretending everything was fine. “Where?”
“Hotels.
Her apartment. Sometimes the office.”
The office — where I’d surprised him with lunch, proud of being a thoughtful wife. I felt sick.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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