Colin closed the door behind him and sat down across from me, the phone still glowing between us with the group chat I’d stumbled into. “The screenshot from March,” he said, “the one where you told Lauren you’d ‘figure out the anniversary excuse later.’ Priya saw it before you deleted your messages. Everyone’s seen it, actually. For weeks.” I stared at him, trying to reconcile the version of Colin I thought I knew — distracted, stressed, absent — with a man who’d apparently been building a case with our entire friend group while I congratulated myself on being careful.
“Ten years,” he said, not as an accusation but like he was testing the weight of the number against what I’d done to it. “I kept waiting for you to tell me yourself. I even gave you openings — asked if everything was okay, if you needed space. You said no every time.” I had. I remembered those conversations and remembered choosing, each time, to protect the thing I was doing instead of the marriage I was supposedly still in. There was no version of “it didn’t mean anything” that survived three months and a cover story that specific.
I asked how long everyone had known. “Since February,” he said. “Priya saw you and Lauren at that restaurant in Riverside. She told me because she didn’t know how not to.” He left that night, and I’ve spent the two weeks since finding out which of our ten years of friends already knew before I did — which is most of them. Lauren stopped answering my texts once Colin filed. I keep thinking about the version of this where I told him myself in December, and how much smaller that conversation would have been than this one.
