A year after their wedding, my phone rang in the early hours of the morning. When I saw Stacey’s name, my first instinct was to let it ring. But something—a quiet tug in my chest—made me answer.
Her voice trembled. “Lily… I need your help. Please don’t hang up.”
I sat up in bed, wide awake now. “Stacey, what is going on?”
There was a long pause before she spoke again. “Alan isn’t who I thought he was. I know you warned me. I didn’t believe you, and I should have. Something is wrong, and I don’t feel comfortable here. Can I come over?”
It wasn’t anger I heard in her voice. It was fear. Real, deep fear.
Against every logical thought in my mind, I told her she could come.
Stacey’s Revelation
She arrived less than an hour later, pale and shaken. Once she settled on my couch, she began to explain. With Alan away on a short trip, she had gone into the office he always kept locked. Inside, she found a private stash of personal notes, photos, and memories he had kept from various women he’d known over the years.
Nothing illegal, but deeply unsettling.
She discovered record after record, each with dates and details that painted a picture of someone who had been drifting from one short-lived connection to another for far longer than either of us had realized. During my marriage. During hers. And with people neither of us had ever heard of.
She looked down, twisting her hands. “I thought you were exaggerating when you said he was distant. I didn’t know the whole truth. I didn’t want to know. But now… now I’m scared of what else I don’t know.”
Her confession didn’t erase the hurt she had caused me, but it opened something I didn’t expect: understanding. She had believed in him the same way I once had. She had overlooked things I once overlooked.
And now she was sitting in front of me, facing the same painful clarity.
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