Chapter 3 - The Messages I Couldn't Delete
One evening I was half asleep on my couch, scrolling my phone, when a notification slid down the screen.
Facebook. A friend request.
Greg.
There was a message sitting right under it, already waiting for me.
"Hope you don't mind me adding you."
I stared until the screen went black, then flipped the phone face-down on the cushion and told myself I was making it into something. He was being friendly. He was Diane's husband, for God's sake.
I left the request sitting there. I didn't reply. I told myself he'd take the hint.
He didn't.
The next message came in on a Tuesday morning while I was pouring coffee in the office kitchen.
The compliment first: "You have a beautiful smile."
I locked the screen like it had burned me and shoved the phone in my desk drawer.
Two days later, another.
"So is there a lucky guy in the picture, or is Diane keeping you too busy for a love life?"
My stomach knotted. I swiped the app closed without opening it.
Then came the one that turned my hands to ice.
"Don't tell Diane I messaged you. She'd get the wrong idea."
I read it three times. That one sentence said everything I'd spent weeks pretending not to understand.
I called my older sister, Kayla, that night from my car, still parked in the garage under my building.
"Your boss's husband is asking about your dating life?" she said. "Megan, screenshot every single one of those messages. Right now."
"I don't want to turn it into a whole thing."
"It's already a thing. You just haven't decided what kind. And whatever you do, don't let it turn into him-versus-you, because in that version you're the one who gets fired."
I made a folder called "Receipts" and then buried it so deep in my phone I'd never have to see it by accident. I still didn't answer him. I hoped — the dumb way you hope when you're 22 — that silence would bore him into stopping.
It did the opposite.
Greg started timing his visits for the hours Diane was gone. He'd wander in around three on a Thursday, when he knew she had her standing meeting across town, and lean in the kitchen doorway like he paid the lease.
"Just dropping off her charger," he'd say. Or, "Figured I'd surprise her with lunch."
There was never a charger. There was never any lunch.
I started checking the lot before I packed up for the day. If I saw his black SUV, I sat back down and waited. Sometimes twenty minutes. Sometimes until my neck ached from holding myself so stiff.
Telling Diane felt like handing her a live grenade.
What if she thought I'd encouraged him? What if she picked him, and I lost the one job that had ever mattered? What if I detonated a marriage over messages I could have just deleted?
I wrote a resignation email at eleven one night. "Diane, thank you for the opportunity, but I've decided to move in another direction." I deleted it. I wrote it again the next morning and deleted that one too.
Kayla called on a Sunday. She heard it before I got a full sentence out.
"Megan, you're shrinking. I can hear it right through the phone."
"I don't know what to do."
May you like
"You save everything, and then you tell her. In that order."
I said I would. I meant it the way you mean things at eight on a Sunday night and stop meaning them by eight on Monday morning.
