Because I knew that gesture.

He had done it to me, on a rooftop, the summer we met, and I had folded it away in the private place where you keep the moments that make you feel chosen.

Seeing him give it to a stranger, casual, practiced, one more move in a routine, told me something the hotel never could: that the tenderness I had believed was ours, particular to us, was just a thing he did, a reflex he could aim at whoever was in front of him.

That is the peculiar theft of infidelity.

It does not only take the future.

It reaches back and quietly picks the pockets of your best memories, and leaves you wondering which of them, if any, were ever only yours.