There were hundreds.
Yoga classes. Sunset dinners. Couples drinking from coconuts. People posing beside a sign decorated with seashells.
After nearly two hours, I found Grant.
He was standing beside a woman with auburn hair and a yellow sundress. His arm was around her waist.
The caption read, “Best surprise vacation ever. Five days with my favorite person.”
The account belonged to Tessa.
The photograph had been posted on the first day of the trip.
That meant she had not met him at the resort.
Grant had arranged the vacation with her in advance.
I clicked through her public profile.
She appeared to be around 35, a few years younger than me.
She worked at a bookstore, volunteered at an animal shelter, and had a teenage son.
There were no earlier photographs of Grant, but one post from six weeks before caught my attention.
Some people enter your life when you least expect it.
Grant had commented with a heart.
I took screenshots of everything.
Then I sent her a direct message from my real account.
“My name is Rachel. I believe you recently traveled with my husband, Grant. I found your note in his suitcase. I am not angry with you, but I need to understand what happened.”
She read it 20 minutes later.
No response came.
By lunchtime, I assumed she would block me.
Then my phone rang from an unknown number.
“Hello?”
“Is this Rachel?” the woman on the other end asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“This is Tessa.”
I stepped into the backyard and closed the door behind me.
“Thank you for calling.”
“I almost didn’t.”
“I understand.”
“No, I don’t think you do.” She inhaled sharply. “He told me you were his sister.”
For a moment, I thought I had misheard her.
“His sister?”
“He showed me photographs of your house. There was one of you standing beside him at a barbecue. He said you were his older sister and that he’d been staying with you after his divorce.”
Grant and I had never been divorced.
We had been married for 11 years.
“What else did he tell you?”
“That his ex-wife left him for another man. That she emptied their savings. That he hadn’t dated seriously since.”
I closed my eyes.
“I am his only wife.”
“I know that now.”
“How did you find out?”
Tessa was quiet.
“On the third day, he was in the shower. His phone kept ringing. I thought it might be an emergency, so I looked at the screen.”
“What did you see?”
“Your name kept popping up. I tapped the contact, hoping to find another way to reach you if something had happened to him.”
She swallowed hard.
“The profile photo was the two of you together.”
My stomach dropped.
“I confronted him,” Tessa continued. “At first, he tried to tell me it wasn’t what it looked like. Then he admitted you were his wife, but claimed the marriage had been over for months.”
“We had breakfast together the morning he left,” I said.
“I realized that when I saw your messages,” she confessed.
“You read them?”
“Only the ones that appeared on the screen. You told him you loved him and asked him to call before bed.”
Shame colored her voice, though none of this was her fault.
“Is that when you wrote on his back?”
