I opened the door and froze when the guest room wasn’t the neat temporary space I’d seen earlier but a battlefield of intimacy. Sheets were rumpled, a silk scarf lay crumpled on the floor, and on the comforter someone had left a Polaroid face up: him and her, laughing into each other’s mouths, hair mussed, hands in each other’s shirts. The date was three days ago.
My breath went thin. The house hummed, indifferent. I stepped in as if through water, every small sound enormous. On the nightstand my mother’s rosary lay, beads caught on a lamp, and beside it a lipstick the exact red I’ve never worn. I lifted the photo with fingers that trembled. Behind it was another, smaller snapshot folded into a scrap of paper—my handwriting, I realized, though I couldn’t remember writing it. I opened the scrap. The single line read: If you ever loved me, leave.
The floor creaked in the hallway. He appeared in the doorway, collar undone, apology already forming on his face. He looked like a man caught not in heat but in fatigue. For a moment we simply looked at each other, two weathered faces cataloging damage. I wanted to hurl the Polaroid at him, to demand names and times and promises. Instead I sat on the edge of the bed and measured the silence between us.
“You could have told me,” I said. My voice surprised me with its smallness.
His answer was a litany of excuses, each more mundane than my worst imaginings. The truth they were hiding wasn’t finesse but carelessness. I listened until the words emptied and something steadied inside me. When he finished, I folded the photograph into the scrap with my handwriting and slid both under the mattress. Then I stood up. Whatever came after.
