By the next day, an amorphous ball of anxiety had formed in my stomach, made up of concern for Anna’s well-being and fear that something else was wrong. For the sake of the trip I tried not to let my worry show. Plus, I didn’t want to exhaust Renata’s patience this early on. I had other anxieties that would need to be addressed, mostly pertaining to the professor. I was still critiquing her academic analysis of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Renata kept pronouncing the title in an exaggerated French accent anytime it came up, followed by a dramatic flip of her hair. “Do you think she’s trying to tell you something? Maybe she wants you to be her Marquise de Merteuil?”

We were packing snacks for the desert when my phone finally pinged. I jumped to check it: an email from Anna.

As I read, relief quickly gave way to fear. “It’s a good thing I don’t trust you,” she had written. “Because if I did, I wouldn’t have had a reason to search for confirmation.”

My stomach dropped. Her letter continued, “What I saw was worse than I expected. I feel like I’ve been living in a fantasy for years.”

My laptop. I’d left it at home. And my password was saved. In my emails, Anna had found the proof she’d been looking for: throughout the four years we’d been together, I had actively longed for others. I’d formed relationships that resembled courtship more than friendship, some that lingered in the realm of inappropriate emotional connection, others that led to sex with strangers as a means of distraction. “Now you’ll no longer have to deal with any reality that comes with us, and you can live happily ever after with your obsessions. Though I’m amazed to see how unrealistic they’ve become. A married pregnant straight woman—you’ve really outdone yourself with this one!”

My first concern was that Anna had written the professor from my account and said something crazy or revealing, as a means of revenge. I had enough sense to know that she wouldn’t do such a thing, and that I was incredibly selfish for worrying about myself right then. I tried desperately to recall each illicit correspondence that existed among my emails. I was almost certain there was no trace of the club encounters—they had all cropped up spontaneously, and I’d kept in touch with none of them. Still, what Anna had found was bad enough.

“I’m devastated that you could be so careless with my heart,” she wrote, and I shuddered. It was exactly how I felt my own heart had been treated throughout my life—carelessly, callously. “I want you to really sift through your issues and face them, and feel a fraction of the torture I feel as a result of this.”