I knew you would hate me before you even finished the first line. Go ahead and say it. I have called myself worse things in the dark while staring at the ceiling of my apartment at three in the morning, wondering how I let a man make a complete fool out of me for eight solid months.

I met Trent down in Bayou Gauche at a regional supply conference. He had that easy, slow-talking way about him that makes a woman from the parishes drop her guard before she even realizes she is doing it.

He told me he was divorced right out of the gate. He told me the ring stayed home because it still felt weird to take off after a ten-year marriage ended in a messy split. He had a whole apartment in Houma I visited three or four nights a week, no family photos on the walls, no stray bobby pins in the bathroom, not a single toothbrush that wasn’t his. For eight months I believed a man who was very, very good at being believed. I kept telling myself I was too smart to fall for a married man, which only proves how blind vanity can make you.

The invitation to the baby shower came through a mutual friend from that exact same work circle. My friend Carla called me on a Tuesday and said, “Come support Melanie, she’s due in June and she doesn’t know many people down this way yet.” I didn’t even know a Melanie.

I figured she was some coworker’s wife or a cousin from out of town.

I walked into a living room full of pink balloons and streamers, and there on the brick mantel was a wedding photo in a heavy silver frame. Trent. In a sharp tux. Smiling down at a pretty woman with dark hair who looked happier than anyone has a right to be.

My mouth went dry and my legs turned to water. I couldn’t move my feet from the welcome mat.

Melanie crossed the room before I could catch my breath, her belly rounding out a yellow sundress, and threw her arms around my neck. She smelled like vanilla lotion and sweet baby powder. “Trent talks about his work friends all the time,” she whispered against my shoulder, taking my hand before I could pull away and pressing it flat against her stomach. “Feel, she’s kicking right now.”

I felt her daughter kick hard against my palm. A little living thing, beating against my hand, while I stood there breathing the same air as the wife he swore he hadn’t seen in two years.

I don’t even know how I got through that afternoon. I ate a piece of yellow sheet cake that tasted like dry cardboard. I wrote some polite nonsense on a pink card about diapers and sleepless nights. I smiled for a photograph I am still in somewhere, standing right at the edge of the group like I belonged there.

I could have walked away right then. I want you to know I considered it. I told myself I would just block his number, throw away his spare key, and let that poor woman have her family in peace.

Carla looked at me sideways while we were putting paper plates in the trash. “You look awful green, Rochelle. You catching something?”

“Just a headache,” I said, my voice shaking so bad I had to bite down on my lower lip until I tasted copper.

But something wouldn’t let it go, a stubborn, ugly streak I hate about myself, so a week later I did the thing I am most ashamed of in this whole mess. Trent had once logged into his bank on my laptop to pay for some rental car deposit. It was still saved in the autofill.

I opened his online statement late on a Thursday night while the rain was hitting the tin roof outside my window. I wasn’t even looking to hurt anyone. I think I just needed to know how big the lie was, how many nights he had spent with me while she was sitting at home heavy with his child.

The hotel charges started scrolling down the screen like a bad movie. A Hampton Inn in Lafayette on a Tuesday I remembered vividly. A room where we ordered room service and laughed about nothing. And then a third charge, a Marriott in Indianapolis, on a weekend Trent swore to me he was helping his brother move farm equipment up north.

I froze on that line, because I wasn’t with him that weekend. And neither, it turned out, was Melanie, because she had posted pictures on her public Facebook of herself at her sister’s house in Thibodaux while Trent was supposedly out of state.

I clicked into the reservation details, my hands shaking so hard I dropped my coffee mug right onto the hardwood floor. It shattered into a dozen pieces, but I didn’t even look down. Because right there on the screen was the name of the second guest registered in that Indianapolis room.

It wasn’t me. And it wasn’t Melanie.

It was a woman named Chloe, with a corporate address in Baton Rouge that matched the exact firm Trent claimed he only visited twice a year for annual audits.

I sat there on my kitchen floor among the coffee shards for a long time, listening to the rain, realizing that I wasn’t the other woman because there wasn’t an “other” woman at all. There were just women, plural, stacked up like cordwood while Trent played some disgusting game across three different parishes.

I didn’t yell. I didn’t call him. I just downloaded the PDF of every single statement from the last twelve months, every hotel charge, every dinner bill, every gift store purchase that didn’t match our weekends together.

The next morning, I printed out the entire packet, slid it into a plain manila envelope with no return address, and dropped it into the blue postal box outside the grocery store on Main Street, addressed straight to Melanie’s house.

I haven’t heard from Trent since he realized his cards were locked and his lies had caught up to him. My phone buzzed four times that afternoon with texts I didn’t open. The comment sections online are split right down the middle, some folks calling me a hero for opening that poor wife’s eyes before the baby came, and others saying I was just a bitter mistress who wanted to burn the house down because I didn’t get to keep the furniture.

Maybe they are both right. I sent the proof to a pregnant woman who deserved better than a husband with a Marriott habit, but I only did it because I couldn’t bear the thought that I was special to a man who didn’t even know what the word meant.