“You need to delete that post before Diane sees it.” My sister said it to someone on the phone, and she thought I was still in the shower.
I’ve known Diane Kowalski since we were nine years old. She was my maid of honor. She held my hand in the hospital when I had my miscarriage. I told her things I never told my husband.
I stood in the hallway dripping wet and didn’t move.
“She’s going to find out eventually,” my sister said. “I just don’t want it to be like THIS.”
I walked back to the bedroom and picked up my phone.
Diane’s Instagram. I scrolled back four months. A photo of her at a rooftop bar – arms around a man I recognized. My husband’s friend group. New Year’s Eve, the night I stayed home sick.
Nothing alarming. But she’d tagged the location.
The same hotel where Marcus said he stayed for his work conference.
My hands were shaking.
I called my sister. “What post?” I said when she picked up.
She went quiet for too long. “What do you mean?”
“I heard you, Trish. What post?”
“Diane put something up last night,” she said finally. “A throwback. From like three years ago. It’s – it’s you and Marcus. From before you two were together. She wrote something weird in the caption.”
I found it. A photo of me, Marcus, and Diane at a cookout. The caption said: Some things were always meant to be. Even when they weren’t ours to keep.
I went completely still.
I opened Diane’s tagged photos and sorted by oldest. And there it was – a photo she’d deleted but someone else had reposted. Diane and Marcus. His arm around her. A caption that said: missing my person.
Posted two weeks after our wedding.
I screenshotted everything. I made a folder. I went back three years of her posts, his comments, the likes, the timestamps.
Then I sent Diane a text: Hey, can you come over tonight? I need my best friend.
She sent back a heart emoji.
My phone buzzed twenty minutes later. Marcus, calling from work.
“Hey, did Diane reach out to you today?” he said. “She texted me something kind of strange and I just – Mel, I think we need to talk.”
The Part Where I Stayed Calm
I’ve never been a screamer. Trish is the screamer. She once threw a plate of pasta at her ex-boyfriend and didn’t even feel bad about it. I’m the one who goes quiet.
I went very quiet.
“What did she text you?” I said.
“It was – look, I’ll show you when I get home. It’s probably nothing. She’s been going through a lot lately, you know how she gets.”
I did know how she got. I thought I knew everything about how Diane got.
“Sure,” I said. “We’ll talk when you’re home.”
I hung up and sat on the edge of the bed for a while. The folder on my phone had forty-three screenshots in it. I’d labeled it receipts because I’m petty and also because I didn’t have a better word for what I was looking at.
Three years of comments. Marcus on her posts: you always know how to have fun and this is so you and little inside-joke stuff I didn’t understand because they were apparently inside jokes I wasn’t inside of. Her comments on photos of us, of me and Marcus at Christmas, at our anniversary dinner last spring: love you both so much with a red heart. Always a red heart. Not the pink one. The red one.
I don’t know why I noticed that. I just did.
I called Trish back.
“How long have you known?” I said.
She didn’t try the what do you mean thing again. “Mel – “
“How long.”
She exhaled. “I didn’t know anything for sure. I still don’t know anything for sure. I saw a comment like eight months ago that felt off and I started paying attention and then last night she posted that photo and I just – I panicked. I called Jamie to ask if she’d seen it.”
Jamie. Of course. Jamie Pruitt, who has the biggest mouth in our entire friend group and who I would have called too, honestly, because sometimes you need someone who will absolutely lose their mind with you.
“Did Jamie know?” I said.
“Jamie knew something. She said she saw them at O’Brien’s back in February. Like, together-together. But she wasn’t sure and she didn’t want to – “
“She didn’t want to what?”
Trish went quiet again.
“She didn’t want to be the one to tell me,” I finished for her.
Nobody wanted to be the one to tell me.
What I Did While I Waited
Marcus gets home at six-thirty most nights. It was two in the afternoon.
I made coffee I didn’t drink. I sat at the kitchen table and opened the folder again and looked at everything in order, like I was building a case, because I guess I was.
The New Year’s Eve photo. The hotel tag. Marcus’s work conference, which he’d told me about in November, which I’d helped him pack for. I ironed his good shirt. I made him a sandwich for the drive.
A photo Diane posted from that same weekend. She’d said she was visiting her college roommate in the city. I remembered because I’d texted her asking if she wanted company on the drive and she’d said next time, I need some solo time.
Solo time.
I went into Marcus’s email. I know his password. We gave each other our passwords when we got married because that’s the kind of couple we were, the kind that doesn’t have secrets, the kind that has nothing to hide so why not just.
I don’t know what I was expecting to find. I don’t know what I was hoping to not find.
There was nothing in his email. Which either meant nothing happened or meant he was careful. I sat with both possibilities for a while and they both felt the same, which is a terrible thing to feel.
I texted Diane: so excited to see you. six okay?
She said: perfect. bringing wine.
Of course she was bringing wine.
Six O’Clock
Marcus got home at six-fourteen. I was in the kitchen. I’d made dinner because I needed to do something with my hands and also because I didn’t want him to know anything was different yet.
He kissed me on the cheek. Put his bag down. Opened the fridge and stood there looking at it for a second like he was thinking about something.
“You talk to Diane?” he said.
“She’s coming over at six,” I said. “I told you this morning I wanted to have her over.”
“Right.” He closed the fridge. “Right, yeah.”
He went upstairs to change and I stood at the stove and stirred something that didn’t need stirring.
He came back down in a different shirt. Sat at the kitchen island. “So she texted me,” he said. “Diane.”
“What’d she say?”
He put his phone on the counter and slid it toward me. I looked at the screen.
I need to tell Mel something and I think you should know I’m going to. I’m not doing this to hurt anyone. I’m doing it because she deserves to know.
I read it twice. Then I picked up the phone and scrolled up to see if there was more.
There wasn’t.
“What does she need to tell you?” Marcus said.
He was looking at me the way you look at someone when you want to read their face before you say the next thing. I’ve been married to this man for four years. I know all his faces.
This one was scared.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess we’ll find out.”
The doorbell rang at six-oh-two.
What Diane Said
She looked exactly like herself. That’s what I keep thinking about. She was wearing her gray jacket, the one I told her looked good on her last fall. She had the wine. She hugged me at the door and she smelled like her perfume and everything about her was exactly Diane and I stood there and let her hug me and felt nothing and everything at the same time.
Marcus came into the entryway and the three of us stood there for a second.
“Hey,” Diane said to him. Not warmly. Not coldly. Just the word.
“Hey,” he said back.
We went to the living room. Nobody sat. I don’t know why nobody sat, we just all stayed standing like we were waiting for something.
“I need to tell you something,” Diane said. She was looking at me, not at him. “And I need you to let me get through it before you say anything.”
I nodded.
“Marcus and I – ” She stopped. Started again. “Three years ago, before you two got serious, we had a thing. It was short. It was stupid. I thought it was over.”
I looked at Marcus. His jaw was doing something.
“I thought it was over,” she said again, and now she looked at him. “But then he called me in November. And I should have hung up. I should have – I know what I should have done.”
The room was very quiet.
“I’m telling you because I love you,” she said to me. “And I’m telling you because I can’t keep doing this and I can’t keep looking at you and pretending I’m your best friend while I’m also – I can’t.”
She put the wine bottle down on the coffee table. Her hands weren’t shaking. Mine were.
“I’m so sorry, Mel.”
The Part Nobody Asks About
Everyone always wants to know what I said. What I did. Whether I threw something, whether I cried, whether I told them both to get out.
Here’s what actually happened.
I picked up the wine bottle. I went to the kitchen and I got three glasses down from the cabinet and I poured all three of them. Then I stood there looking at the three glasses and I put two of them back.
I drank mine in the kitchen by myself.
Marcus came in after a few minutes. I heard the front door close, which meant Diane had left. He stood in the doorway and didn’t say anything.
I didn’t say anything either.
I finished the wine. I rinsed the glass. I put it in the drying rack.
“I need you to go stay somewhere else tonight,” I said.
He left.
I went upstairs and got into bed and lay there in the dark for a long time. I thought about the hospital, the miscarriage, Diane’s hand in mine. I thought about the sandwich I made him for the drive. I thought about the red heart emoji, forty-three screenshots, a hotel on New Year’s Eve.
I thought about how she brought wine.
I still don’t know what that means about her. I don’t know what it means about me that the wine is what I keep coming back to.
My phone was on the nightstand. Trish had texted six times. I didn’t answer.
I opened my folder. Forty-three screenshots.
I closed it.
I turned the phone face down and stared at the ceiling until it got light outside.
—
If this story stayed with you, send it to someone who needs to read it.
For more unbelievable moments that change everything, check out what happened when I Walked Through the STAFF ONLY Doors With My Seizing Daughter in My Arms, or read about how My Best Man Tried to Upgrade Our Wedding Package the Same Morning I Called to Cancel It, and don’t miss the story about how My Wife Walked Into That Hotel Like She Owned It. She Did – Under a Different Name.
