PAGE 4 of 7 — “Someone Familiar”

The Facebook profile picture stopped her.

Melissa wasn’t a stranger. She recognized the face immediately — she’d seen it at Daniel’s company holiday party two years earlier. They’d talked for maybe ten minutes at the bar about a mutual love of hiking. Sarah remembered thinking she seemed nice.

Scrolling through Melissa’s public photos, mostly gym check-ins and brunch pictures, Sarah found nothing damning. No secret couple photos. Nothing obvious.

But then she noticed something small — in the background of a photo from a work conference eight months ago, blurry but unmistakable, was Daniel’s jacket draped over the back of a chair next to Melissa’s.

He’d told Sarah that conference was in Chicago. He hadn’t mentioned Melissa went too.

Sarah sat with her laptop open long after midnight, piecing together a timeline instead of confronting him with fragments. She wanted dates. Screenshots. Something undeniable, not something he could talk his way around again.

She thought about calling her sister. She thought about calling a lawyer. Instead, she did something smaller and quieter — she asked Daniel, over breakfast the next morning, in the most casual voice she could manage, how the Chicago conference had gone.

He answered a beat too fast. “Same as always. Boring panels, bad coffee.” He didn’t mention a single name. Not one person he’d met, worked with, or sat next to for three days.

That’s when Sarah knew she wasn’t imagining this anymore.

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