The same shirt he had worn to his sister’s wedding the previous spring.
Tessa slowly scrolled.
Dinner arrangements.
Messages.
Photographs I wished I had never seen.
I forced myself to focus on the dates.
Eighteen months earlier.
Then further back.
I looked up.
“This isn’t Olivia.”
“No,” Tessa said softly.
“That’s me.”
I stared at her.
“You’re…”
“One of them.”
I looked around the table again.
Seven women.
“No.”
I wasn’t even sure what I was denying.
Tessa moved the phone closer.
“Keep scrolling.”
So I did.
Tessa.
Brooke.
Olivia.
Someone Marcus met at a conference.
Another woman who worked near his office.
Once all the information was together, the pattern became painfully obvious.
Thursday evenings.
Late meetings.
Gym sessions that mysteriously ran long.
Work trips that somehow always began a day earlier than necessary.
Marcus hadn’t made one careless mistake.
He had created another life.
Several other lives, actually.
And all of them had existed beside the life we shared.
“He told me he was separated,” Tessa said.
“Me too,” Brooke added. “He told me you were still living together temporarily because you were sorting out the house.”
I closed my eyes.
Marcus had used our marriage itself as the excuse for why he couldn’t fully commit to any of them.
It’s complicated.
We’re basically separated.
We’re still living together because of the house.
Olivia had been the person who finally started pulling at the thread.
She became suspicious because Marcus would never spend weekends with her.
He rarely stayed overnight unless he claimed he was traveling.
He kept her isolated inside a very carefully controlled version of his life.
Eventually, she found a tagged photograph from a charity event.
Then our anniversary pictures.
Then photographs from our vacations.
There we were publicly.
A married couple.
