He heard her go into the baby’s room, heard her cooing to her, probably about her big bad father who diminished her mommy. He had given her this life on a silver platter and this...this iciness was how she was repaying him? It seemed obscene to him if he thought too hard about it, which, yes, he’d been doing as of late. That was what inspired his whole pursuit of the other woman, of course.

A few months back, when his wife was asleep, he’d slipped her phone out from its charger and had gone downstairs to his home office. He knew her passcode; she thought he didn’t. He knew she changed it every month to prevent him from snooping. But he was agile. He could tell from her fingers dancing on the keypad exactly which digits to type in. When you get used to someone’s finger movements, how they navigate space, reveal thoughts and feelings, deciphering these types of gestures become far easier.

This numerical code seemed like a birthday, though he didn’t recognize whose. She cycled through birthdays a lot: her mother’s, her current best friend’s, the baby’s. At some long-ago point, his. Usually, when he breached her phone, he would spend a while in her iMessages, see whom she was communicating with. Maybe a short foray into her emails, too, her web searches. Most of the time, he came up short. His wife, it turned out, was boring, to an almost maddening degree. Once, he’d found a link to pegging porn in her search history, but that was as spicy as she got. Even her texts to her friends were mind-numbingly dull, logistics about wine nights, questions about childcare.

But he still felt like he needed to keep tabs, even if all the information didn’t amount to anything useful. He’d learned that, too, from his ex. She’d taught him that if you let someone in, you can never be too careful, that you always need to stay one step ahead of them, to always check over your shoulder.

This one time, however, when he’d opened her phone, he found a new app downloaded. Upon first glance, it seemed like a meditation app; the little icon was a figure looking upward at a peaceful sky. But instinct told him to open it, anyway. Not everything was as it seemed, of course. Even an iPhone app with poor user experience.

He’d been right; it was a meditation app, with different guided exercises for varied times of the day. But there was also a journal segment, a place for sad, diffident people to chronicle their supposed changed feelings after a week, a month, of daily guided meditations. What a bunch of bullshit. He clicked on the journal icon, aware then that he was sitting in total darkness. It hadn’t occurred to him to turn on a light.