A thought crossed my mind like a slow-burning realization. A few years back, Naomi had been furious with Ben after catching him in some shady affair with a woman he’d been meeting up with in some dingy place. I remember she’d come to me, soaked and shivering, asking me to marry her. I thought she’d moved on. I thought she’d chosen me. But now, standing in the middle of that apartment, I wondered if giving him this place was her way of trying to pull him away from whatever mess he’d been in back then.
The commotion of my argument with Ben had drawn the attention of a few neighbors, and they were watching us from the hallway, muttering to each other.
“Who does this guy think he is?” someone said. “This is Mr. Smith and Miss Hayes’s apartment—everyone in the building knows that.”
Another neighbor chimed in, “Yeah, they’ve been here for years! They’re practically the model couple around here. Haven’t you seen their picture on the bulletin board?”
It stung. All those years I thought Naomi and I were building a life, sacrificing, making do with what we had. And here, in this other world I didn’t know, they were celebrated as some perfect, happy couple.