The Trade Secrets

The baseball game droned on in the background, another Sunday of watching wealthy men chase balls while our marriage quietly disintegrated. Mark's iPhone sat on the kitchen counter, screen lighting up every few minutes with messages he'd angle away from me.

I'd started taking vitamin D supplements last month — the doctor said I was deficient, but I knew the real deficiency was in this house, in this life we'd built together.

'You're my best friend,' Mark had told me seven years ago, pressed against the wall of that shitty apartment in Queens. Now I watched him from the doorway, his thumb hovering over his phone, that familiar flinch when I entered the room.

The corporate spy angle had been my theory for weeks. His company had just launched that IPO. Competitors would pay anything for insider information. I'd even gone so far as to install that tracking app on his phone — yes, I'd become the spy in my own marriage.

But the truth, when it came, was so much worse than industrial espionage.

He left his phone unlocked when he went to the bathroom that night — careless, unlike him. I didn't want to look. Some part of me preferred the mystery, the possibility that I was paranoid, that the vitamin deficiency really was making me crazy.

Her name was Sarah. She worked in accounting. They'd been meeting for lunch at that place downtown — the one with the terrible sandwiches we used to joke about. The messages were mundane and devastating in equal measure.

'She doesn't understand me.'

'I feel alive when I'm with you.'

The baseball game ended. I heard the crowd's roar from the living room, that collective release of men who'd invested three hours in something that ultimately meant nothing.

When Mark came back, I was sitting at the kitchen table, his phone between us like a weapon I didn't know how to use.

'Explain,' I said.

He didn't even try to deny it. That was the worst part — the absence of fight, like he'd been waiting for this moment, for me to catch him so he could finally stop pretending.

'I was going to tell you,' he said.

'When?'

'After the Series.'

And there it was — his timeline, his convenience. The baseball metaphor almost funny in its cruelty. I'd been traded without my consent, released from a team I hadn't known I could leave.

I packed that night. The vitamins stayed on the counter — let him deal with the deficiency now.