The Spinach Between Us

The spinach stuck in Marcus's teeth had been there throughout dinner at Valencia. I'd watched it cling to his incisor like a secret—small, dark, impossible to miss—while he discussed his day at the firm. He hadn't noticed. Or maybe he had, and he simply didn't care.

"The new client is a bull," he'd said, spearing another forkful. "Traditionalist. Won't budge on terms." He'd grinned then, that charmingly boyish smile that had once made me forgive his forgotten anniversaries and missed dinners. "But I'll wear him down."

Now, lying beside him in the darkness of our bedroom, his iPhone illuminated on the nightstand with a notification. I should have rolled over and slept. Instead, I reached for it.

Marcus never locked his phone. He said trust was the foundation of marriage, that secrets were for people with something to hide. I'd believed him, just as I'd believed his late nights at the office were research sessions for the hedge fund that was supposedly making us wealthy enough to join the padel club where we now spent our weekends with couples we barely knew.

The notification was from an encrypted messaging app: Signal. The sender: "Viper."

The message: "The bull suspects nothing. Tomorrow's transfer clears. You've been paid."

Viper. I knew that name—it belonged to one of Marcus's supposed "clients." The man Marcus had brought to dinner last month, the one who'd asked too many questions about my job in compliance at the bank where I processed wire transfers. The one Marcus had worn down, he'd said.

His phone wasn't locked, but his Signal messages were encrypted—except for this notification preview, this tiny slip of spinach in his teeth he hadn't noticed.

I placed the phone back exactly as I'd found it. Marcus stirred in his sleep, his arm draping over me, warm and familiar. This was the man who'd held me when my mother died, who'd laughed at my terrible cooking, who'd somehow made life with him feel like a story I wanted to keep reading.

But now I knew: the spinach had been there all along. I'd just been the one pretending not to see it.