I think back to the emails I found, “Heather Taylor” and Chris and their cozy exchanges about cake. It didn’t start there, I realize; the “Heather” emails only began after the affair started. So where did it all begin?

I drag myself out of the warmth of the bath and pad to the kitchen, rivulets of water running down my back. I need answers. But first, I need wine.

I had assumed all the text messages sent between Chris and Leah would have been lost when her phone clattered through the deck into the cold water of the lake. But I hadn’t realized that she took a full backup of her phone memory. Extended storage on her laptop kept everything. Guess how long my husband had been fucking my twin? Almost two years! Two goddamn years. I hadn’t even dreamed he was cheating on me. Bastard.

She’d told me she didn’t know who he was before I introduced them. That was a crock of shit. They had been in communication since early in my and Chris’s relationship, back before we got married. He had reached out to her, asking her to please consider coming to the wedding. She had refused but they had started to exchange messages. A few awkward back-and-forths at first, then one day she had “accidentally” sent him something explicit. Followed immediately with an: Oops, that wasn’t meant for you . Jesus, was he stupid?! This was the oldest trick in the book, the accidental text to test the waters. What had he replied? Shame… A little word with enough weight to encourage her. Things had escalated pretty quickly. I’d been on a business trip when they had arranged to meet. Be careful of Megan, she had written, she tends to see things that aren’t really there.

Don’t I know it, my traitorous husband had replied.

I sit and stare at the pages of messages charting their affair, all the times they had met up when he’d told me he was away with work. All the times he had made excuses not to come to an event with me, or to visit my mum. There was the date of Hannah’s birthday party when I’d had to go alone. The bastard had even been fucking my sister the weekend I had the flu and could barely crawl to the kitchen to heat up some soup. He had been so apologetic, so contrite when he found out how ill I’d been. Goddamn it, he had almost cried with his guilt that he was working while I needed him.

I am so angry I don’t know what to do with myself. I walk in tight circles around the living room, picking up trinkets of Leah’s life and putting them down again. I want to break things, hurl that stupid glass bowl across the room to smash into a thousand pieces, scream at the top of my lungs, tear the curtains from their pole, destroy and rail and break.