Part 1 of 2
At 9:00 PM, his phone, which sat on the cushion between us, lit up.
I glanced down instinctively. The preview message was from Jackson, his best friend. It wasn’t about the game they were planning to play, or the movie we were watching. It was a single, bizarre sentence: “Is that whale still talking?”
Followed by three crying-laughing emojis.
I froze. My brain tried to process the geometry of the sentence. A whale? talking? Why would Jackson be discussing marine biology at prime time on a Friday?
Before I could ask, Stuart’s chest heaved. He snatched the phone from the cushion, his face contorted in panic, and sprinted toward the bathroom, muttering about needing to blow his nose. He was so desperate to hide his bodily functions—a courtesy I usually appreciated—that he made a fatal tactical error.
He forgot to lock the screen.
I sat there, the movie explosions muffled in my ears, staring at the bathroom door. A cold dread, heavy as lead, settled in my stomach. It wasn’t intuition; it was a primal alarm bell.
I stood up, walked to the bathroom door to ensure the water was running, and then circled back to the phone he’d left on the counter in his haste. The screen was still glowing, the group chat open.
The chat name was The Boyz, featuring Jackson, Josiah, and Johnny. And as I scrolled up, the air left my lungs.
They weren’t discussing marine life. They were discussing me.
“Is that whale still talking?” was a response to a voice note Stuart had sent five minutes prior. I pressed play, holding the phone to my ear with a trembling hand. It was a recording of me. I was rambling about my day at work, excited about a promotion possibility.
Stuart’s caption under the recording: “This pig won’t shut up. Someone please kill me.”
My hand flew to my mouth. I kept scrolling. It was a massacre. A digital archive of hatred.
There were videos of me laughing at TikToks, captioned: “Look at the jiggle. Gross.”
There was a recording of me singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to my mother, Virginia, over FaceTime in August. Caption: “She’s screeching again. My ears are bleeding.”
I wasn’t sad. Sadness is a soft emotion, a collapsing inward. This was different. This was a hardening. I felt my blood turn into something molten.
I scrolled back to July. Jackson had asked, “Bro, if she’s so annoying, why haven’t you dumped her yet?”
Stuart’s response was a paragraph that seared itself onto my retinas: “Are you kidding? She’s so desperate for love it’s hilarious. Free meals, the BMW, this apartment. I’m living like a king while she plans our ‘wedding’ lol.”
I looked around my apartment. My apartment. The one I paid for. The furniture I bought. The food in the fridge I stocked. Stuart had been living here for nine months, rent-free, driving my car, eating my food, all while documenting his disgust for an audience of three other losers.
September. A photo of the PS5 I bought him for his birthday.
Josiah: “Bro, you’re a genius. This is the best scam ever.”
Stuart: “I know, right? She even pays for my gym membership because I told her we should ‘get healthy together’ before the wedding. What wedding?”
The bathroom door handle jiggled.
Panic spiked, sharp and electric. I had seconds. I pulled out my own phone and started snapping pictures. Click. Scroll. Click. Scroll. I didn’t read them anymore; I just captured them. Dates, timestamps, context. The evidence of my own humiliation.
When the door opened, I was back on the couch, staring blankly at the TV.
Stuart emerged, looking flushed but relieved. “Man, Jackson wants to know if we’re still down for the barbecue next weekend,” he said, wiping his hands on his pants. He sat down, draped his arm around my shoulders—the same shoulders he’d probably mocked an hour ago—and kissed my temple.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice sounding hollow and distant, like it was coming from underwater. “That sounds fun. I can make my potato salad.”
He squeezed me. “You’re the best, babe.”
I smiled. It was a rictus of a smile, sharp enough to cut glass. Inside my pocket, my phone held two hundred screenshots of him calling me a whale, a pig, desperate, and stupid.
He went back to watching the movie. I sat there, feeling the weight of his arm like a heavy chain, and realized that the man I loved didn’t exist. He was a character played by a con artist. And the show was about to get cancelled.
The next morning, the sun rose over a city that felt fundamentally different. The colors were desaturated, the noise sharper.
“Babe, can I borrow the car? Meeting Jackson at the gym,” Stuart asked, pouring himself coffee from my machine into my mug.