I typed and deleted a dozen replies before finally sending: I’m fine. Needed air. Home soon.
It wasn’t fine. Nothing about the drive home felt fine — the porch light looked too warm, too welcoming, like a trap dressed up as a home. I sat in the driveway for ten minutes before I could make myself go inside.
For three days I became a detective in my own marriage, and I hated every part of it. I told myself I wasn’t snooping, I was checking, as though the distinction mattered. I went through the hall closet, the box of old cables in the garage, the shoebox under his side of the bed that turned out to contain nothing but expired coupons and a single sock.
On the fourth night, Matthew fell asleep on the couch mid-movie, laptop open on the coffee table, still logged into his email. I stood over it for a long, ugly minute before I sat down and started scrolling.
Most of it was nothing — work threads, a fantasy football league, a receipt for the watch-store visit he’d apparently noticed after all and hadn’t mentioned. And then, buried in a folder labeled simply E, I found eleven months of correspondence with someone named Priya Anand, subject line after subject line reading things like Draft 3 — notes attached and Formatting question and Cover concepts, round two.
My hands went cold before my brain caught up.
I clicked the oldest email.
Matthew — got your message. Yes, I read the full manuscript over the weekend and I want to be straightforward with you: this is genuinely one of the strongest debut collections I’ve seen in years, and it’s strange that “Emily R.” doesn’t already have an agent. I’d be honored to represent her, but you mentioned she doesn’t know this is happening yet — I have to be honest, that’s an unusual way to start a career. Talk me through it?
Emily R. Me. My initials had been on stories I’d written in college and abandoned in a drawer, half-finished, unsent, unread by anyone but Matthew, who used to ask to see them and who I’d always assumed was just being kind.
