When I say my husband left his phone unlocked, I don’t mean I went through it.
He was in the living room, watching videos. Then he got up to take a shower. His phone stayed on the table, screen still on.
That’s when the messages started coming in.
I picked up the phone just to put it on silent. But a woman’s name appeared on the screen.
I tried to lock it — and accidentally opened the conversation.
Months. Not Messages — Months
What I saw wasn’t one message.
Or two.
It was months of conversations. Long ones. Every day. At all hours.
She called him “my love,” “darling,” “I miss you.”
And he answered her the same way.
I felt my blood literally start to boil.
I scrolled up and read things he had never said to me.
That he felt lonely.
That our life had become routine.
That this woman brought back the excitement he thought he had lost.
There were messages I can’t even repeat — intimate enough to feel like something was being torn out of my chest.
Nothing Physical… And Yet Everything Was There
She had sent him photos.
He had sent his.
Nothing naked. Nothing “technically incriminating.”
But there was emotion. Desire. Fantasy. Tenderness.
Everything — behind my back.
The message that cut me the deepest was simple:
“If we ever meet one day, everything will be different.”
She lives in another country. That’s why they had never met.
But that detail didn’t change how I felt that night.
When He Came Out of the Bathroom
I was standing there, holding his phone.
I didn’t scream.
I didn’t cry.
I just asked quietly:
“Who is this woman?”
He went pale.
He took the phone from my hands and started repeating the same things over and over.
“That’s not what it looks like.”
“She’s just a friend.”
“I never cheated on you physically.”
He swore he would delete everything. Said he didn’t know how it had gone that far. That it had “just happened.” That he had never seen her in real life.
But all I could think about were his messages:
“I miss you.”
“I want to wake up next to you one day.”
“With you, I feel things I had forgotten.”
The Days After
Days passed.
He acted like everything was normal.
Made me breakfast.
Talked to me like nothing had happened.
And inside me was this unbearable mix of anger, sadness, jealousy, and humiliation — with nowhere to put it.
I didn’t know which emotion hurt the most.
The Question That Won’t Leave Me
Since then, one single question has been living inside me:
What does it matter that they never met?
Isn’t this still betrayal?