Chapter 3

I lay in bed, tossing and turning.

This wasn't the first time I'd caught Zachary lying to me. But when did I first realize something was off? It was the day I woke up in the hospital after my car accident.

Thinking back about it, I found it almost laughable. When I opened my eyes, there wasn't a single familiar face beside me.

It wasn't until I asked the nurse to call Zachary that he finally showed up breathless, with hair a mess, and with a container of seafood chowder in his hand.

One of his shirt buttons was fastened wrong as if he'd dressed in a hurry and hadn't even noticed.

The Zachary I knew was never sloppy. His hair was always perfectly styled, and his clothes were always pressed and immaculate. It was rare to see him so unkempt.

He told me he'd gone out to buy breakfast, estimating when I'd wake up so he could be there.

But he forgot that by 11:00 am, breakfast hours were long over. And he also forgot that I was allergic to seafood.

The truth was obvious. He was desperate for an excuse, so he grabbed whatever was left at the hospital cafeteria.

If it had been anything else, maybe I wouldn't have questioned him. Perhaps I would've been convinced.

But it was seafood chowder.

Even fate seemed unwilling to let me stay blind. It shoved the truth in my face, forcing me to see it. It wanted me to save myself.

A few days earlier, a woman added me on Facebook. She sent me a message with only her name, "Tiffany Larson."

I didn't think much of it. People often reached out through Facebook for art commissions, so I made a note of her name and moved on.

That was until I noticed that Zachary also had a "Tiffany Larson" in his friend list.

It was probably a burner account—the profile picture was different from the one saved in Zachary's phone under the name "Tiffany", and the username didn't match either.

Profile pictures can be faked, and usernames can be changed, but photos can't lie.

In her posts, I saw Zachary in places I had never been.

A side profile of him wearing glasses, working on his laptop at a massage parlor.

His hand intertwined with someone else's in a hotel room.

A picture of him strolling through a mall, looking far too comfortable with someone by his side.

There were even pictures of him in an unfamiliar bedroom, and in every photo, his face was either turned away or blurred in the background.

Her most recent post was from the day I woke up after my accident. It was taken inside Zachary's car.

She had intentionally framed the shot to show his left hand without a wedding ring. But I still recognized that it was Zachary instantly.

A faint scar ran across his left index finger—a mark from the time he tried cooking for me when he was 22 years old and cut himself.

I felt so bad for him that I bought countless scar creams, but he refused to use them. He told me it was a symbol of his love for me, and it was something he'd tell our future child about one day.

But before that child could even exist, he had already turned those promises into empty words.

None of her posts had captions. It seemed like she had posted those photos just for me to see.

What a blatant provocation.

My vision blurred, and my stomach twisted violently. A wave of nausea rose in my throat, and I lurched toward the trash can, retching. However, nothing came out.

At that moment, something inside me shifted.

This marriage was beyond saving. It was tattered and broken beyond repair—patching it up now would only be humiliating.