The Spare Phone Held Years Of Spare Love Chapter 01
In the sixth year of our marriage, I found another woman on my husband’s phone.
He didn’t show it to me. While he was in the shower, an unknown number sent him an intimate photo.
The woman was wearing pajamas, leaning against his chest and flashing a peace sign at the camera.
I picked up his phone and opened the message.
When I scrolled up, I found the chat history had been wiped clean.
There was only that one photo in the entire thread. The contact name was a single letter: L.
He had not saved her full name. He had not left behind any extra information.
But it was obvious.
He was cheating on me.
I put the phone back on the coffee table, screen facing down.
The water in the bathroom stopped. Ethan came out drying his hair, picked up his phone as usual, swiped a few times, and showed no change in expression.
I stared at the side of his face.
From college until now, it had been eleven years. I knew that face so well I could trace it with my eyes closed.
He suddenly turned his head. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
He smiled and reached out, tucking my hair behind my ear.
His fingertips brushed my earlobe, cool and faintly scented with grapefruit body wash.
“You must be tired today,” he said. “Get some rest.”
I nodded, but I lay awake until dawn.
The next morning, I took the day off.
After his car pulled out of the complex, I went back home and opened his backup phone.
There was no L in his contacts, but the photos were still in the cached files folder.
And it was not just the one from last night.
There were photos from two years ago, from a year ago, from six months ago. Different places, the same woman.
In front of a hotel’s floor-to-ceiling window, she stood wrapped in a bathrobe, holding up a glass of wine.
On a seaside boardwalk at sunset, she had her arm looped through his.
At a sushi restaurant, she fed him a piece of salmon.
The most recent photo showed her with one hand resting on her slightly rounded stomach while he lowered his head and kissed her forehead.
It had been taken two months ago.
My phone buzzed with a message from him.
[The hospital isn’t busy today. I’ll come home for dinner. What do you want to eat? I’ll pick it up.]
I turned off the screen and didn’t reply.
Then I called the sushi restaurant from the photo.
“Hi, I’d like to check a reservation from about three months ago. It was for a private room by the window, under the last name Bennett.”
“Please hold for a moment… Mr. Bennett, right? Yes, Mr. Bennett. Party of two. There’s a note here under Ms. Hayes.”
I hung up.
He had never taken me to that sushi restaurant.
He said he didn’t like raw food.
So it was not that he disliked it.
He just didn’t want to eat it with me.
It took me a week to figure out who she was.
Laurel, thirty-one, a cellist with the city symphony orchestra.
She was not his first love returning to his life, nor was she some casual fling he had picked up on a whim.
She had entered his life much earlier than I had imagined.
Eight years ago, Ethan gave a public outreach lecture at the orchestra hall, and she sat in the first row.
Seven years ago, he was invited to a New Year’s concert. She played a solo, and he gave her flowers.
Six years ago, the year we had just gotten our marriage license, a certain Mr. Bennett began appearing on her social media again and again.
Never his face.
Only his hands.
The hand helping her out of a car, the hand carrying her cello case, the hand holding a wineglass on her birthday.
I went through every post she had made over the past five years.
She once posted a photo of sheet music with the caption: [The seventh year of him teaching me how to read music.]
She once posted a Ragdoll cat with the caption: [When you’re not here, it keeps me company in your place.]
She once posted a blurry view from a window with the caption: [He said he’d bring me here again next time.]
