The next morning felt like stepping into someone else's life. My phone was a hot thing in my hand—notifications like little beetles biting. The anonymous message had done its job: ripples out in a dozen small, ugly ways. People I barely knew had forwarded, scratched their heads, whispered. That's the beauty of gossip: it doesn't need proof to start a rumor. It just needs someone willing to whisper.
Arjun's responses got sharper overnight. First annoyed, then defensive, then a little scared. He sent a DM at dawn—a long, weird message that pretended I was the unstable one. "Who the hell are you? Stop this, leave D alone." Classic move: blame the messenger. He wanted to make me the crazy one, the stalker. Cute. I saved the message. Evidence comes in all forms; lies are evidence too, if you can show the pattern.
Meanwhile, her friend—Kriti—went feral. She posted in a private group: "Is this true? Someone please tell me this is fake." The group imploded into speculation. People picked sides without knowing facts. I wanted to laugh, but the laugh came out like a cough. The delicious part was watching how quickly people were willing to believe gossip if it smelled like scandal. It's human nature to prefer a story where someone falls from grace; it's cleaner than messy truth half the time.
I didn't sleep much. I found myself watching her social feed like a junkie. No new photos, no check-ins. Maybe she'd figured something was off. Maybe she'd started to be careful. That petty worry—that she'd suddenly notice a thread of unease in her life and alter the pattern—made my chest pinch. I wanted her to flinch. I wanted the confident mask she wore in public to crack just a little.
Arjun, meanwhile, made two mistakes. One, he started deleting comments and DM threads as if erasing digital footprints would erase guilt. Two, he grew sloppy in the way nervous people do—typing too fast, messaging the wrong person, leaving a screenshot open on his desktop when he thought no one was watching. I don't know if it was arrogance or ignorance, but it gave me a tooth to bite.
I decided to test him. Not with fire, not yet. A small probe. I sent another anonymous message—more pointed this time: "You're not careful. People talk. One more slip and there's more." He answered with fury and denial, then, in a half-hour, sent a voice note to D—my wife—asking her to meet, sounding like he'd been betrayed, urgent and apologetic. That was the flinch I wanted. He'd chosen the lie of intimacy—try to buy peace with words—and that showed me where his weakness was: attachment to appearances. Keep the facade, and he'd keep his life.
Watching his panic was a lesson. People with secrets panic in predictable ways: they call their lovers, they apologize, they try to patch holes by making promises. Transparency is the enemy of panic; promises are its bandages. I smiled—a small, sharp thing—and planned.
My plan now had two layers: push Arjun into clumsy defense and pry open the space around my wife so gossip could seep in. But I also had to be careful. Push too hard and the story flips; push too soft and nothing happens. It's like tuning a guitar string. Precision. Patience. Cruelty, but measured.
I called Raj and told him to be ready for a favor. Nothing specific—just be available, watch, be a silent presence if needed. He didn't ask questions. That's loyalty. That's currency I could use.
By midday I drove past her office, not to confront but to observe. Her car was there. A small seed of triumph flared—she was at work, maybe oblivious, maybe not. I sat for twenty minutes and watched colleagues come and go. Her car left. I followed at a distance like a shadow. She went to lunch with a group; Arjun was nowhere to be seen. That's the thing: cheaters are cowardly in daylight. They love the safe pockets of night.
When she texted later—short, curt, nothing like the morning's warm voice—I felt a punch in the gut. "Are you okay?" I typed and didn't send. The urge to reach out, to pretend nothing happened, to hear her ordinary voice, stabbed me in some old place. Then the other voice—cold, surgical—said, don't. Let her do the moving. Let her slip.
That night, as I scrolled through the day's new scraps, I realized another ugly truth: revenge isn't just about hurting the other person. It's about the slow, deliberate erasure of safety. I wanted her to know that the life she'd taken for granted could be taken back, piece by piece. The knowledge that someone was watching transforms a home into a theater of guilt. I wanted that theater lit.
But there was a problem I couldn't shake. Every move I made widened the canyon inside me. With every person I pulled into the whisper-circle, I felt a little less like the man who'd once made her tea at midnight and a little more like a ghost living on spite. That terror—of becoming what I hated—hovered behind my actions like smoke. I tried to ignore it. For now, the smoke was useful: it masked my fear, gave my actions heat.
At 11 p.m., I watched as her profile finally updated—a single photo, nothing incriminating, just a selfie at a café. People commented, liked, pretending everything was fine. The social theater resumed its masks. I felt stupid for wanting chaos; I wanted her to fall, yes, but I also wanted the catharsis that comes after the collapse. I wanted the truth to let me breathe again. And I knew what that meant: the longer this goes on, the more blood it will cost—not necessarily hers, maybe mine.
I tucked the phone away and stared at the dark. The city murmured like a living thing. I whispered into the quiet, "Welcome home, stranger," and meant it like a promise and a threat. The ripples were widening. Reckonings were coming.