“You picked out a couch with her. A dining table. A bedroom set. You chose paint colors. Pale blue for the living room. Sage green for the bedroom.”
Every word was a hammer blow. Milo sat there with his head in his hands, shoulders shaking, but I couldn’t stop.
“You signed a two-year lease, Milo. Two years. This wasn’t a mistake. This wasn’t a moment of weakness. This was systematic planning. This was you deliberately building a new life while lying to me every single day.”
“How did you find all this?”
His voice was muffled by his hands.
“Does it matter? Because you got sloppy? Because you underestimated me?”
I laughed, bitter and sharp.
“You thought I was too trusting to question you, too comfortable in our marriage to suspect anything, too invested to look for evidence?”
I gestured to the Instagram photo still displayed on my phone.
“You got caught by social media, Milo. Some random woman at a bachelorette party posted a photo of you and Hazel looking like newlyweds at a romantic restaurant. My college roommate’s cousin. She recognized you and sent it to Sarah, who forwarded it to me.”
I shook my head.
“All your careful planning, all your separate lies to different people, all your encrypted text messages and secret credit cards, and you got caught because you forgot about Instagram.”
Milo finally looked up at me. His face was wet with tears. His eyes were red and swollen.
“I never meant to hurt you,” he said.
“But you did. You are.”
I stayed standing. Every second you sit there trying to make yourself feel better with apologies doesn’t change anything. The silence stretched between us. Outside, I could hear traffic from the street. Someone’s TV playing through the thin walls. Normal life continuing while ours fell apart.
“What happens now?” Milo finally asked.
I looked at him, this man I’d loved for eleven years, this stranger who’d become a person I didn’t recognize.
“Now,” I said quietly, “you leave.”
“Now you leave.”
The words hung in the air between us. Milo stared at me like he was waiting for me to take them back, to soften them, to give him some opening to negotiate. I didn’t.
“You can’t be serious,”
he finally said.
“Isla, we need to talk about this. We need to figure out—”
“There’s nothing to figure out. The apartment is in my name. You’re the one who had the affair. You’re the one who stole from our savings. You’re the one who lied for eighteen months.”
I crossed my arms.
“So you’re the one who leaves.”
He stood up slowly like his legs weren’t working properly.
“Where am I supposed to go?”
“I don’t care. Your brother’s. A hotel. The apartment in Williamsburg you already rented.”
I walked to the door and opened it.
“Just not here. Not tonight.”
Milo grabbed his phone from the coffee table, started dialing. I watched him try Hazel’s number once, twice, three times. Each call going straight to voicemail.
“She’s not answering,”
he said, panic creeping into his voice.
“Why isn’t she answering? Maybe something happened.”
I almost laughed at the irony. The woman he destroyed our marriage for was now leaving him in the lurch. But I kept my face neutral and said nothing. Around midnight, when it became clear Hazel wasn’t going to respond, Milo finally grabbed some clothes and left. I heard him in the hallway on the phone, calling his brother Ryan, asking if he could crash there for a few days. I locked the door behind him and stood in the sudden silence of the apartment. Our apartment. My apartment now. Then I poured myself another glass of wine and waited.
The next morning, I woke to seventeen missed calls from Milo. I ignored all of them and made coffee. Around ten o’clock, he showed up at the door. I didn’t let him in. Just stood in the doorway blocking his entrance.
“Hazel’s gone,”
he said. He looked like he hadn’t slept. His eyes were bloodshot, his clothes wrinkled.
“She called in sick to work. Indefinite leave. Her roommate said she packed up and left last night. Just disappeared.”
“Okay,”
I said.
“Okay? That’s all you have to say?”
His voice rose.
“Isla, she won’t answer my calls. She won’t respond to texts. I went to her apartment and her roommate said she seemed upset, said something about needing space, and just left. Where would she go?”
I sipped my coffee.
“I have no idea, Milo. She’s your girlfriend. You should know her better than I do.”
