I was going to have to look at her.
It is astonishing how fast a mind will build an entire catastrophe out of a single sentence from a five-year-old.
In the span of one held breath I had constructed the whole thing — the afternoons, the excuses, the lies folded into a decade of morning coffees.
I had already decided how betrayed I was.
I had already started grieving.
That is the cruel efficiency of jealousy: it does not wait for evidence, it does not pause to consider alternatives, it simply floods the space where trust used to be and fills it, instantly, with the worst version of every fact.