My fingers found the girl's profile and kept scrolling—picture after picture after picture—and I couldn't stop.
Three years ago she'd posted a photo—two hands laced together, fingers interlocked.
The caption read:
*Tonight, I bloom for you.*
I recognized those hands instantly—the ones twisting the sheets into knots. Eugene's hands.
Three years ago.
I scrolled like someone possessed, faster and faster, until finally—four years back, in a group photo from Eugene's company—I found her.
She was his coworker.
Yet in all these years, I'd never once seen her at any of Eugene's work dinners.
All this time, she'd willingly kept herself hidden for him.
I forced down the nausea clawing up my throat
and sent Eugene a message:
*I'm home. I know everything.*
An hour later, footsteps shuffled outside the door, and with them a woman's voice, thick with tears.
"Gene, it's my fault. Let me in. I'll explain everything to her."
"No!"
Eugene kept his voice low, deliberately so, but the force still bled through—commanding and shielding at once.
The man on the other side of that door was not the one I knew.
With me he was gentle, easygoing. But now—decisive, hard-edged, yet still somehow soft with her.