She told only what she had to. Only what could be proven. That’s the painful thread that binds this one to memory.
He knew something was wrong before the proof. That’s the difference between insecurity and intuition — he had a feeling. And the phone, almost mythic, confirmed it. The account holder. The forensics. The deleted texts. The recovering software. And the damning partial truth.
She said she made out with him. That maybe he had a boner. As if arousal were incidental. As if he weren’t inside the space that was once sacred — her body, her desire, her secrecy.
The ache wasn’t just jealousy. It was betrayal’s fog, thickened by imagination. Because she wouldn’t say more, he was left to fill the void. And in that void lived the car, the blowjob, the facial, the high, the casual dismissal of Mike’s heartache. The fear became pornographic, because it had no boundaries.
And yes, Mike had emotionally cheated first — the Craigslist search for being wanted — and that’s part of the alchemy too. The shame, the spiral, the unforgiveness of self. He sought hunger in others, and now she fed her hunger elsewhere. All of it shadowed by what can’t be known.
This is what betrayal does: it robs the betrayed of closure. The mind makes movies when the lips won’t speak truth. And those movies never end.