"I'm not hungry," she said without looking up. I asked if she was feeling all right, and she answered that she'd had a long day. It wasn't a hostile exchange, not yet. I took my bag to the hallway and returned to the kitchen for water, thinking I might cook for myself and leave her some pasta in the refrigerator in case she changed her mind. The glass pitcher was behind her laptop, which was angled slightly toward the counter.
The screen was bright enough that I saw the open message thread before I realized I was reading it. The name at the top belonged to a man from her office who had been mentioned enough times that I recognized it immediately. I'd heard about his promotion, his new apartment, and his supposedly terrible sense of humor. There were messages about a hotel and a night they could barely wait to repeat, written in the plain, specific language of people who didn't believe anyone else would see them. I stood there with one hand halfway toward the water pitcher, unable for a moment to connect the letters on the screen with the life I thought I was living.
I did not click through her messages or pick up the laptop. The conversation was already there, visible from where I stood, and I understood enough. I took out my phone and photographed the screen, perhaps because handling records was what I did when a situation changed too quickly for me to understand. Then I set the phone down and moved the water pitcher to the counter. My mouth was so dry that I couldn't have swallowed a drink.
"Kate," I said. She looked up and followed my eyes toward the laptop. Her expression changed so quickly I might have missed it if I hadn't been watching. For one instant she looked frightened, then angry, then carefully blank. She shut the screen halfway, as though changing the angle of the object could change what I'd seen.
"What?" she asked. I told her I'd seen the messages and asked if they were what they appeared to be. She said I was jumping to conclusions, that people at work joked around, and that I needed to stop being suspicious over nothing. I asked which part was a joke. She looked at the closed laptop, then back at me, and said I shouldn't have been reading her private conversations.
I could have argued about privacy for an hour. I could have pretended not to know that the messages were more than flirting, although they were too explicit for that. Instead I told her I'd seen them by accident while reaching for water and that I wanted a truthful answer. She sat very still for a moment, studying me in the way she studied clients when deciding how much information to give them. Then she sighed.
"Fine," she said. "Something happened. One night. I made a mistake."
I asked whether something meant sleeping together, and she said yes. I asked whether she was still talking to him, and she said they worked together, so of course they had to communicate. When I pointed out that the message on her screen referred to wanting to repeat the night, she rolled her eyes and said I was reading too much into a careless phrase.