Part 2I Invited His Mistress To Dinner

I began to look for the things I had spent years ignoring.

Gavin had never been a man who kept secrets. He used to leave his phone lying around anywhere, text me his coordinates without prompting, and retell every stupid joke his friends made the second he walked through the door. Suspicion required a leap of faith I had never had to make.

But things were changing.

He started placing his phone screen-down on the counter.

At first, I told myself it was just a random habit. I ignored it.

Then came the evening his phone rang, and instead of answering it at the kitchen island, he stood up and walked out onto the balcony, sliding the glass door shut behind him. I sat on the sofa, watching his back through the glass. His voice was a low murmur, completely muffled.

The call lasted ten minutes. When he came back inside, his face was perfectly composed. "Just work," he said.

I nodded and didn't press.

But I watched him slide the phone directly into his front pocket.

Then there was his schedule.

Over the last two months, his "late nights at the office" had doubled.

One evening, when he told me he was stuck at his desk, I happened to be driving back from a bridal fitting near his building. I pulled over and sent him a quick text:

“I’m right downstairs. Want to grab a quick bite?”

His reply came almost instantly:

“In a brutal meeting that’s going to run late. Head home, sweetie. Don't wait up.”

I parked across the street and looked up at the glass tower. The windows of his office floor were dark. I didn't go inside. I put the car in drive and went home.

But I wrote down the date in my calendar.

A week later, I was looking through his dry-cleaning pile to find a parking receipt, and my fingers brushed against a small slip of paper in his suit jacket pocket.

It was a restaurant receipt.

The date matched the night of his "brutal meeting." The timestamp read 8:17 PM.

The restaurant was The Hearth & Vine. It was miles away from his office.

I slipped the receipt back into the pocket, smoothing the fabric down so it looked untouched.

The insomnia started then. It wasn't the kind where you toss and turn; it was a cold, clinical wakefulness. I would snap awake in the dead of night, my mind incredibly sharp, running through every detail, every date, every shift in his tone, feeling a slow frost settle over my bones.

Gavin noticed the exhaustion on my face one morning.

"Have you been sleeping okay?" he asked over coffee.

"Just wedding planning," I lied. "It's fine."

He frowned, setting his mug down. "Do you want to push the date back? We can postpone if it’s too much."

I shook my head. "No. Everything is booked. We aren't changing it."

He stared at me for a long beat, then reached across the table to touch my cheek. "Nina, you've been off lately. Is something wrong?"

"What could be wrong?" I managed a small, empty smile. "I'm just tired. Everyone gets stressed before their wedding."

He watched me for a few more seconds, then let out a slow sigh and dropped his hand. He didn't ask again.

And I didn't volunteer anything.

A strange, glassy silence began to settle between us. On the surface, we were the same happy couple we had always been, but we both knew the air had grown thin. We were like a sheet of ice over a deep lake—solid to the eye, but one sharp stomp away from a shattering collapse.

A few days later, he went out for a guy's night, leaving me alone in the apartment.

I sat in our living room for hours, surrounded by the furniture we had picked out together, the curtains we had argued over, and the dry-erase calendar on the fridge with the wedding countdown.

Twenty-three days.

I pulled up the screenshot of the girl’s profile picture and zoomed in.

She was radiant, her smile effortless. She looked like someone who hadn't yet learned how easily a life can be dismantled.

I wondered what she thought she was to him.

I wondered what lies Gavin told her when he was holding her hand.

I deleted the image, locked my phone, and went to the kitchen to pour a glass of water. It was ice-cold, chilling me from my throat down to my stomach.

I couldn't do this anymore. I couldn't keep suffocating in the dark.

I needed to see it.