I started looking at her like she was a city map. Streets, intersections, back alleys. Names that used to be just names now became possible weak points. Friends. Cafés. Her office timings. The bar she liked on Fridays. Little things you don't notice when you're in love—like which colleagues she liked to sit with at lunch, whose jokes made her laugh loud. All of it was ammunition if I knew how to aim.
First one I checked: her phone patterns. I could've hacked it if I wanted—there are always ways—but I'm not a fool ready to go to jail on impulse. So I did the slower, cleaner thing: social media. People overshare like drunk teenagers; they leave footprints everywhere. I scrolled her profiles with the tiny, awful thrill of someone reading someone else's diary. Pictures of dinners, check-ins, comments from someone with a name I didn't know at first. That name kept showing up—light, casual, tagged in snaps where she looked… happy, like a different woman. Laughed at jokes I'd never heard. He was careful, polite in the comments, like he was building a reputation in public as "harmless." Coward's playbook.
Then there were receipts. I trawled our joint account history like a ghost counting bones. A dinner here, a hotel charge there—small, plausible. Nothing that screamed, cheater, but enough to sketch a pattern. The math of betrayal doesn't always read like fireworks; it's more like a slow leak in a pipe you trusted. You find the wet patch and follow it until the whole damn place smells like rot.
I started following her—quietly, like a shadow. Not full stalker mode; I'm not stupid. Just enough to see who she met and where she went. A coffee meet at a place two blocks from her office. A laugh that didn't sound like our old kitchen. I watched her from across the street once, feeling like a voyeur and a scientist combined. She wore that stupid red coat—the one I'd gifted her the first Christmas—and she looked free in it. That sight landed like a fist in my gut. Free. Fuck.
The more I learned, the less surprised I was by how small and human and cowardly this whole mess was. It wasn't some cinematic betrayal—no dramatic gasps, no affairs whispered in luxurious hotels every night. It was a series of choices made in the margins: texts after work, lunch that stretched into late evenings, someone else providing the attention I used to give without thinking. That slow accumulation is worse, because it means this wasn't a mistake; it was a habit that grew steady as mold.
At work I started testing people—casual questions, little lies to make sure the story I'd weave later would hold. "Seen her around?" "Who does she hang with?" I watched faces, watched how people looked down when I mentioned names. Some shrugged like they knew nothing. Others blinked too fast. Human beings are porous; they leak if you listen.
One night I met Raj again, and we drank more than we should. He listened without flinching—just the kind of quiet steadiness I needed. He didn't cheerlead. He didn't say, "Go burn the bitch." Instead, he said, "You need to be smarter than her." I almost laughed and then I didn't. He'd seen enough of life to know when bloodlust is just fear dressed up in courage.
I started keeping a folder on my phone—screenshots, timestamps, place names, little notes. A dossier that felt obscene and necessary. Each picture I saved made me feel less raw and more… dangerous. Cold logic is an anesthetic; it numbs the pain just enough to let you move.
But here's the ugly truth: the more I built this case, the more I had to look at her. Staring at her face in pictures, reading her messages like a dead language—there's a cruelty to that too. I found myself missing things that weren't mine to miss: the way she used to hum while chopping onions, the stupid way she'd fight with the kettle. Memory is a traitor; it takes what it wants and doesn't ask permission.
At the end of a long day stitching together the map of her life, I sat on the balcony and let the city noise wash over me. The dossier sat on my lap like a small, heavy animal. I thought about the man tagged in three of her photos, the one whose name my tongue now knew and whose face I had yet to see in person. He was a target, sure—but he was also proof that my marriage had been, for months, a second-rate play in which I wasn't even an understudy.
I promised myself one rule as the folder bulged: no impulsive moves. No storms. Quiet, surgical, precise. Patience is a type of cruelty, too—slow enough to make the other person squirm, precise enough that they don't see the blade coming.
Then a new line in the dossier made me pause. A location check-in—her and that man—tagged at a hotel two towns over. Same red coat, same laugh I couldn't stand. The tag included a time: yesterday. Fresh.
My hands went cold. My heart thudded like it was trying to get out and run. I looked up at the black sky and whispered, not to the stars but to myself, "Okay then. Let's go find out everything."