With a sigh, I braced one hand against the edge of the table and struggled to my feet, my belly pulling me forward like an anchor. I tried the obvious passwords first. Our wedding date. His birthday. Mine. The anniversary of the ceremony at St. Augustine's, where half the Family had gathered to watch us become something neither of us fully understood. None of them worked. My hands trembled as I entered the date from Cara's ultrasound report.
Success.
I bit down on my lip hard enough to taste copper. Sneering, I opened the messaging app's storage. Sure enough, Cara's profile picture was there. Their avatars matched.
He said, "If love lasts forever," and she replied, "Does it matter if we're together every day?"
I clicked into the chat and was greeted by a flood of "Darling, I miss you" and "Baby, when will I see you again?" Determined not to let my emotions take over, I activated the screen recording feature. My thumb pressed against the inside of my wedding ring, hard, the gold biting into skin. I kept scrolling.
Next, I opened his shopping app. To my dismay, his order history was filled with pregnancy supplements, high-end skincare, imported cosmetics. Every item shipped to the same address. Every delivery made to Cara. The address in Maplewood, that gated enclave the Family controlled, where the homes sat behind iron fences and the neighbors knew better than to notice who came and went.
With one hand resting on my restless baby, I took screenshots with the other. I sent the videos and screenshots to myself, then carefully deleted the evidence. Satisfied that everything was in order, I placed the phone back exactly where I'd found it. Same angle. Same distance from the edge. The way a woman learns to move in a house where nothing is truly hers.
Waddling back to the bedroom, I lay down on my side. The weight of betrayal settled over me as my heart felt like it had a hole ripped through it, and I couldn't stop shivering from the cold weight of betrayal. After seven years of marriage, seven years of carrying the Moretti name like a second skin I never asked for, I had been reduced to a cruel joke. The dutiful wife. The clean face of a dirty family. And all along, he'd been spending Family money on a woman from the Valentes, a name so small it barely registered in the territories.