"Roland Harding, I'm hurt, and you're still doing this? How long are you going to keep this up?!"
Her tone was pure bewilderment.
In her mind, the affair wasn't even that serious.
After all, once I'd broken down—screaming, crying, falling apart—she'd started deleting the messages on a regular schedule. She'd even changed all her passwords to my birthday.
So she genuinely couldn't understand why I was still "throwing a tantrum."
I ran my thumb absently over the rough, faded scar on my hand and said nothing.
That was when her phone rang.
The same ringtone. The familiar one that had been going off in the middle of the night for almost a year now.
Ida had told me once it was the company's emergency line. I hadn't questioned it.
Not until her birthday. I'd been at the grocery store picking out the salmon she loved, debating whether to make her pan-seared filet or a lemon-butter bake, when I looked up and saw her across the aisle—wrapped in another man's arms, the two of them browsing snacks together like any other couple.
That was the moment it finally hit me.
Ida had been cheating on me for God knows how long.