Cream with gold trim, very tasteful, very expensive. We bought a renovated Craftsman house in Arcadia with both our names on the mortgage. The kind of place with original hardwood floors and a backyard pool that made our friends comment goals on every photo. For the first few years, we were good. Not perfect. Nobody’s perfect, but solid.
We packed each other’s lunches. We split the remote without arguing. We had inside jokes and weekend routines and a life that felt like it was going somewhere. People called us a power couple. Dual-income, no kids yet, the Instagram-ready existence that collected heart emojis from college friends I hadn’t seen in years. But somewhere around year four, things started shifting in ways I didn’t have words for yet.
The man who used to ask about my day stopped asking. The man who used to kiss me goodbye in the morning started leaving for work before I woke up. Our conversations became transactional. Who’s picking up groceries? Did you pay the electric bill? I’ll be home late tonight. I told myself it was normal.
That marriages mature. That passion fades into comfortable routine and expecting butterflies after 6 years was unrealistic. I was lying to myself, but I didn’t know that yet. It started with his phone. Levi had never been protective of it before. He’d leave it on the counter while he showered, toss it on the couch during movies, hand it to me if mine was dead and I needed to look something up.
Then one Tuesday morning in late July, I woke up and noticed it face down on his nightstand. Not just set down casually, but positioned deliberately so the screen wasn’t visible. When I picked it up to check the weather, something I’d done a hundred times before, I found it locked with a password I didn’t know.
New security protocol at work, Levi said when I asked over coffee that morning. He didn’t look up from his toast. Company got hacked last month. It is making everyone use biometrics and complex passwords. Big hassle, but they’re serious about it. It sounded reasonable. Everything Levi said always sounded reasonable. That’s what made him good at sales.
