Digital Residue

The spinach salad sat untouched between them, wilting in the restaurant's oppressive silence. Emma watched a piece of green cling to Marcus's front tooth and said nothing—letting it remain there like the small cruelties that accumulate in seven years of marriage.

'You're doing it again,' Marcus said, not meeting her eyes. His hair had started thinning at the temples last year, something he touched compulsively when cornered.

'Doing what?'

'That thing. Where you look right through me.' He finally looked up, and she saw it: that familiar despair she'd grown immune to. 'We used to be happy, Em. Remember when we adopted that stupid cat together?'

She did remember. Barnaby had been a rescue with abandonment issues, much like Marcus himself. The cat had destroyed their furniture, peed on their bed, yet they'd laughed about it then. Now Barnaby slept at the foot of their bed like a furry, judgmental witness to their mutual dissolution.

Her iPhone buzzed on the table—a familiar vibration pattern. Work, probably. Or maybe him, the man whose messages still lived in her deleted folder, recoverable with the right forensics. She'd been sleeping with Julian for three months now. Marcus had noticed something shifting—he was too perceptive for his own good—but he hadn't asked. Not until tonight.

'Spinach,' she said suddenly, pointing to her own tooth to show him.

He wiped it away with his napkin, missing the subtext entirely. That was Marcus: always cleaning up the surface messes while ignoring the rot underneath.

'Emma.' His voice cracked. 'I need to know if there's someone else.'

Her phone buzzed again. This time she glanced at the screen: Julian, asking if she was coming over later. The cruel irony—that her husband finally found his backbone, his voice, his dignity, at the exact moment she'd already betrayed him irreparably.

She thought about saying yes. About letting this clean wound finally bleed instead of the festering lie they'd both been living. But instead she heard herself say, 'There's no one else, Marcus.' The spinach in her own stomach felt sharp, jagged.

He relaxed visibly, the tension leaving his shoulders. That was the tragedy, she realized—he still loved her enough to believe it. That night, while he slept beside her with his arm thrown protectively over her waist, she messaged Julian back: *Not tonight. Not ever again.*

But the damage was done. Some truths, once spoken or even just thought, become their own reality. The cat watched from the doorway as she lay awake, her iPhone dark on the nightstand, knowing she would never un-know what she was capable of becoming.