When Flynn, my husband of five years, told me he wanted a divorce, I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. I just stood there, frozen, as if the words hadn’t fully registered. A minute earlier, I’d been asking him what he wanted for dinner. Then suddenly, he dropped a sentence that shattered everything we had built. “I can’t do this anymore.”

For weeks, I’d felt it — the distance, the cold silences, the tension thick in the air.

He had been coming home later and later. Conversations that used to be filled with laughter had dwindled into strained small talk or silence altogether. I thought maybe it was stress from work or something I had done wrong. I tried to reach out, to fix whatever had cracked between us. I asked him, again and again, “Please talk to me, Flynn.” He’d just shake his head and say, “It’s nothing,” or worse, “I’m tired.” But when he finally said he wanted out, I felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff with no ground beneath me.

He left that night, taking only a small overnight bag. No drama. No yelling. Just a quiet exit. I wandered the house afterward like a ghost. Our bedroom still smelled like his cologne. The throw blanket on the couch was still folded the way he liked it. I kept expecting to hear his keys jingling in the door, like maybe it had been a bad dream.

Days passed. I barely ate. I barely slept. My mind kept spinning, trying to understand. Was there someone else? Was I not enough? I needed answers. That desperation is what led me to the old laptop — the one he stopped using after getting a new one a year ago. I found it stuffed on the top shelf of our bedroom closet, buried under a pile of sweaters. The battery was nearly d3ad, but when I plugged it in, it powered up without a password.

My hands trembled as I opened the browser. I checked his email. Nothing. I opened his messaging apps — and that’s when I saw them.

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