Not fully shut, just enough to signal, do not enter. I could hear her laughing. The kind of laugh she does when she is trying to impress someone. When I walked past, the laughing stopped.
She opened the door a minute later and came out with that fake casual face. She told me she was on the phone with her friend B, and then immediately asked why I was looking at her like that. I said I wasn't. She shrugged and said, "Whatever," and then asked if I had picked up the deposit receipt for the florist.
I reminded her I paid it online last week. She rolled her eyes and said, "I know. I just like having paper copies because you forget things." That was a new thing, too.
Little jabs about my reliability while I was basically funding the whole production. After dinner, she took a shower and left her phone on the counter. I didn't grab it. I didn't need to.
I'm not proud of the thought that came next, but I'm also not going to pretend I'm above it. I looked at her laptop again. I didn't open her messages. I didn't need to hack anything.
She had left a tab open with her email, and there was a confirmation from a restaurant I recognized. Not one she and I ever went to. A reservation for two. The name on the reservation was Laura.
The note said, "Anniversary table if possible." Anniversary. I checked the date. It was for the next night, when she told me she was going to a work dinner.
My stomach went cold, but my face stayed calm. I took a photo of the screen with my own phone. Then I closed the laptop exactly how I found it and went to the living room like nothing happened. When Laura came out of the bathroom, she was in a good mood.
Too good. She kissed me on the cheek and asked if my overtime check hit yet. I said it would on Friday. She smiled and said, "Perfect, then we can finally lock in the last payments and stop stressing."
I nodded. Inside my head, something clicked into place. Not the dramatic kind. The practical kind.
The kind that makes you start thinking in lists. Vendors, deposits, refund windows. What is cancelable and what is not? I didn't confront her that night.
I just let her talk about chair covers and lighting while I quietly decided I was not going to marry someone who had an anniversary dinner booked with her ex behind my back. The next day, I worked like normal, but I paid closer attention to the clock than usual. Laura's reservation was for 8:00 in the evening. She had told me the work dinner started around 7:00.
Around 6:30, she texted me that she would probably be late because her team decided to try a new place across town. She added a laughing emoji and said, "Wish me luck surviving three hours of office gossip." I replied with a simple thumbs-up. Then I opened the photo I took of her laptop the night before.
The restaurant was not across town. It was 15 minutes from our apartment. That detail mattered to me more than the cheating itself. Cheating is already bad.