Merry Christmas, You Filthy Cheater

By Sunday morning, my fever had climbed to match the kids'. I sat on the bathroom floor, clutching the cool porcelain of the toilet while waves of nausea rolled through me. Emma was finally keeping down some crackers, and Tommy's temperature had dropped to a manageable 99.8, but I felt like I'd been hit by a truck.

Ryan should have been home hours ago.

I'd texted him twice—once at nine AM asking when he'd be back, and again at eleven when Tommy started asking for Daddy. Both messages showed as read, but no response. The silence stretched through the afternoon like a taut wire, vibrating with my growing anxiety.

By three o'clock, I couldn't take it anymore. My hands shook as I pulled up his contact, thumb hovering over the video call button. I needed to see his face. Needed some connection beyond his increasingly distant text messages and rushed phone calls.

The phone rang once. Twice. Three times.

Declined.

I stared at the screen, my fever-addled brain struggling to process what had just happened. Ryan never declined my calls. Even during his busiest days, he'd at least pick up to tell me he'd call back later.

My finger trembled as I tried again.

Declined immediately this time.

The rejection hit me like a physical blow. I set the phone down on the kitchen counter with shaking hands, my vision blurring with tears I couldn't blame entirely on being sick. Through the living room doorway, I could see Emma curled up on the couch, her small face still flushed but peaceful as she dozed.

Ten minutes crawled by like hours. Then my phone buzzed.

Ryan's name flashed across the screen with an incoming video call.

I snatched it up, my heart hammering against my ribs as I accepted the call. Ryan's face filled the screen, and immediately I could tell something was off. His dark hair was damp, droplets of water still clinging to the ends. A white hotel bathrobe was pulled tight around his chest, the terry cloth fabric stark against his flushed skin.

"Hey, sorry about that," he said, his voice slightly breathless. "I was in the shower. The presentation ran really late last night, and I crashed hard."

Behind him, I could see white walls—generic hotel wallpaper with that subtle textured pattern every chain used. The lighting was harsh, fluorescent, making his skin look washed out.

"How are you feeling?" he asked, but his eyes weren't quite meeting the camera. They kept darting to something off-screen.

"Awful," I said, my voice hoarse. "The kids are finally getting better, but I think I got the worst of it. When are you coming home? I really need—"

"The signal's pretty bad up here," Ryan interrupted, even though his image was crystal clear. "Mountain reception, you know how it is."

But that wasn't what made my blood run cold.

As Ryan shifted slightly, adjusting his position on what I assumed was the hotel bed, the camera angle widened just enough to show the edge of the frame. There, barely visible in the bottom right corner, was a flash of red.

A red high heel.

Just the pointed toe, elegant and unmistakably feminine, peeking out from behind the white hotel comforter.

My breath caught in my throat. The fever that had been making me dizzy suddenly felt like ice water in my veins. I blinked hard, wondering if my sick brain was playing tricks on me, but when I looked again, it was still there.

A woman's shoe.

In Ryan's hotel room.

"Sarah? You still there?" Ryan's voice sounded distant, like it was coming from underwater.

I watched in horrified fascination as he seemed to notice my stunned expression. His eyes followed my gaze, and I saw the exact moment he realized what I was seeing. His face went pale beneath the harsh hotel lighting.

"Shit," he muttered, so quietly I almost missed it.

Then the camera jerked violently as he moved his phone, the image spinning wildly before settling on a close-up of his face. The background was now just white wall, carefully angled to show nothing else.

"Sorry, the phone slipped," he said quickly, but his voice was tight with something that sounded like panic. "This mountain air makes everything so slippery, and—"

"Ryan." My voice came out as barely a whisper.

He kept talking, words tumbling over each other in a rush. "The client meeting went great, by the way. Really great. Johnson thinks we've got the contract in the bag, and—"

"Ryan, stop."

But he couldn't seem to stop. Wouldn't stop. The words kept pouring out of him like water through a broken dam, each excuse more frantic than the last.

"—and you know how these things go, networking is so important, and the client specifically requested—"

"RYAN!"

My shout echoed through the quiet house, and I heard Emma stir on the couch. Ryan finally fell silent, his dark eyes wide and guilty on the screen.

"What was that?" I asked, my voice deadly quiet now. "In your room. What was that red—"

"The signal's really cutting out," Ryan said quickly, his image already pixelating as he did something to his connection. "I can barely hear you. I'll call you back when I get better reception, okay? Love you."

The call ended abruptly, leaving me staring at my own reflection in the black screen.

I sat there for a long moment, the phone heavy in my trembling hands. My fever-addled brain tried to process what I'd just seen, tried to find some innocent explanation for a woman's high heel in my husband's hotel room.

But there wasn't one.

There couldn't be one.

The phone slipped from my numb fingers, clattering onto the kitchen counter as the truth crashed over me like a wave. All those late nights. All those perfectly reasonable explanations. The vanilla perfume, the mysterious stains, the way he'd started guarding his phone like it contained nuclear codes.

The way he looked at me now—not with love, not even with indifference, but with guilt.

Because he was cheating on me.

My husband was cheating on me, and I'd just caught him.

The woman's intuition I'd been trying so hard to ignore finally roared to life, bringing with it a clarity that cut through my fever like a knife. Every strange moment, every odd detail, every gut feeling I'd dismissed as paranoia suddenly clicked into place with devastating precision.

I was twenty-eight years old, sitting in my kitchen with a fever of 102, while my husband video-called me from another woman's hotel room.

And somewhere in the back of my mind, beneath the shock and the pain and the crushing weight of betrayal, a small voice whispered the question that would haunt me for days to come:

Who was she?