Chapter 2

The word "Sanctuary" burned in my mind.

It was months ago, before this strained peace, before he supposedly "came back."

I was looking for a tax document on his laptop, something mundane.

He was at the university, late again.

A folder caught my eye. "Sanctuary." Password protected.

My heart hammered. Michael wasn' t the type for secret folders.

His password was "Emily7," our daughter' s name and her age at the time.

My fingers trembled as I typed it. It opened.

Years. Years of emails, journal entries, poems. Not to me. To her. Olivia.

His graduate student.

"My kindred spirit," he called her.

"My true intellectual equal."

He wrote about our life, my life with him, as "mundane," a "desert of the mind."

He lamented being tied to a woman who couldn' t understand his "depths."

Olivia' s replies were just as sickening.

"My dearest M, you deserve a universe of thought, not a picket fence."

She praised his "brilliant mind," a mind I knew intimately.

I remembered the late nights, years ago, when he was struggling with his dissertation.

I remembered ghostwriting entire sections, polishing his arguments, making connections he' d missed.

I remembered networking for him, using contacts from my old marketing career to get his early papers noticed.

I helped build the pedestal he now stood on, the one he used to look down on me.

The screen blurred. A cold wave washed over me, then a burning rage.

This wasn't just an affair. This was a dismantling of our entire life together, a rewriting of our history with me as the villain, the obstacle.

Sanctuary. For him and Olivia.

For me, it was the antechamber to hell.

I closed the laptop, the click echoing in the silent house.

The betrayal was absolute.