Twenty-three thousand, eight hundred dollars over twenty-one months.
She sat back in the chair and laughed once, quietly, because if she didn’t laugh she might break something expensive.
Then she opened Nikki’s social media accounts—not because she was a jealous woman by nature, but because jealous women and careful women often behaved identically while being judged very differently.
Nothing obvious. No public posts. No photos together.
But there were hints if you knew where to look.
A mirror selfie in a green dress Carissa had never seen, captioned: can’t wait for november.
A blurry story from two weeks earlier: a man’s hand holding a wine glass across a dark restaurant table, only the cuff visible, the watch unmistakably Damen’s because Carissa had bought it for him on their eighth anniversary after he spent six months hinting that all his friends had “real watches now.”
Carissa stared at the image until the edges of it blurred.
Then she closed the laptop and went to bed in the guest room without touching her own side of the mattress.
The next evening, she came home early.
No warning. No text.