My Boyfriend Bought His Mistress Gifts With My Money

It was almost midnight when I saw it.

I was in my home office on the thirty-second floor, the city glittering below like spilled sugar. My laptop was still open on a quarterly report. My coffee had gone cold two hours ago. I told myself I would scroll for five minutes and then sleep.

Five minutes. That was the deal.

I opened Instagram on my Samsung. Emerson's handle popped up first, the way it always did. He had posted a new photo. I tapped it without thinking, the way you breathe.

A girl on a bed. Cream sheets I recognized because they were mine. A brand-new iPhone Pro Max in her hands, the box still open beside her. She was laughing at the camera. Her hair was down. She looked so pleased with herself that it took me a second to place her face.

Then I placed it.

Neriah Clark.

The scholarship girl. My scholarship girl. The one I had been funding, quietly, through my father's office, for the last two years. I had never met her in person. I had only seen her file photo — hair pulled back, careful smile, application essay about her mother working two jobs. I had cried a little the first time I read it. I had signed the transfer form the next morning.

And now she was on my sheets.

I stared. My thumb hovered.

Then the photo moved.

Just a flicker. A Live Photo. Android renders them now. Emerson never remembered that. He always said my phone was "basically a calculator with a screen." I used to laugh.

The animation played. Two full seconds.

In those two seconds, Neriah leaned sideways and kissed a cheek that wasn't in the frame yet. Then Emerson's face slid in. His hand was on her waist. His fingers were spread wide, comfortable, like he had done it a hundred times. He was laughing too. His head tipped back the way it did in our own photos, the way I used to think was only mine.

The loop restarted. Kiss. Hand. Laugh.

Kiss. Hand. Laugh.

I didn't move. I didn't blink. Somewhere in my chest, something very small and very warm went cold and stayed there.

I set the phone down on the desk, face up, so the loop kept playing. I wanted to look at it. I wanted to memorize it.

Then I opened my laptop.

I pulled up my banking app first. I keep everything organized. I always have. Last Tuesday, 6:14 p.m., I had Venmoed Emerson four hundred and eighty dollars. The memo line said textbooks — spring. He had thanked me with three heart emojis and a selfie of himself at what he called "the library." I remembered smiling at it while I ate a salad at my desk.

I opened the shared cloud account next. He set it up a year ago so we could "back up our life together." His words. He had never learned how to lock it down. His receipts synced automatically from his email.

I scrolled.

Apple Store. Same Tuesday. 6:54 p.m. One iPhone 15 Pro Max, 256GB, Natural Titanium. Twelve hundred dollars on a payment plan, four-eighty down.

Forty minutes.

Forty minutes between my transfer and his purchase. He hadn't even waited an hour. He hadn't even bothered to move the money through a second account. He had walked from his phone to the store and handed my money to a cashier for a girl I had been feeding since her freshman year.

I sat back in my chair.

I did not cry. I want to be clear about that. I have cried over Emerson before — small, private tears in the shower over the size of his ambition, over how tired he seemed, over how much I wanted to help him carry it. I have no more tears left for him. I found out that night. There is a bottom to what you will spend on a person, and I had just hit mine.

I smoothed my blazer lapels. I did it without thinking. My assistant, Priya, once told me she could always tell when I was about to end a meeting because I did that first. I did not know I was about to end anything until my hand moved.

I picked up my phone. The Live Photo was still looping. Kiss. Hand. Laugh.

I swiped it away and called my father.

He answered on the second ring. He always does. It is almost one in the morning and he answers on the second ring, because that is the kind of father Leonard Montgomery is when his daughter calls at odd hours.

"Aurelia."

"The Clark scholarship," I said. My voice came out level. Almost bored. "Terminate it. Effective immediately."

A pause. Not a long one. Not long enough for a question.

"What do you need?"

"That. For now."

"Done by morning."

"Thank you."

"Aurelia."

"Yes."

"Are you safe?"

I looked at the window. My own reflection looked back, sharper than I remembered. "Yes."

"Good."

He hung up. Forty-three seconds, start to finish. I checked.

I sat in the dark for a long time after that. Then I got to work.

I opened a new folder on my desktop and named it, simply, EVIDENCE. I began downloading. Every one of Emerson's public posts from the past four months. Every one of Neriah's. Every comment they had left on each other's accounts under thin fake handles I recognized now that I was looking. I pulled the Venmo history and the Apple receipt and screenshotted the timestamps side by side. I made a list of the campus locations where I remembered seeing them tagged — the coffee shop by the library, the parking structure behind the arts building, the bench outside the chapel where Emerson once told me he wanted to propose to me someday.

I wrote each address down.

I did not send anything. I did not text anyone. I did not confront him.

I just built the file. Neatly. Alphabetically. The way I build everything.

Outside, the sky was starting to turn the color of steel. I closed the laptop. I finished the cold coffee in one swallow.

I had a keynote to attend in nine days.

I would be ready.