04/02/2026
MY WIFE'S 4 AM CHEATINGS
She came home at 4:07 in the morning smelling like cheap perfume and somebody else’s promises.
I was awake before I heard the key in the front door. That had become a habit in the last few months, one of the smaller humiliations you don’t talk about out loud because hearing yourself say them makes them harder to excuse. I had gotten used to the way my body refused deep sleep on the nights Sarah went out “with the girls” or stayed late for “client hospitality” or had one of those endlessly vague work obligations that somehow always ended after midnight and came wrapped in other people’s cologne and champagne. By then, even in the dark, I could identify the sound of her trying to move quietly through our house. The careful slide of the deadbolt. The faint click of her heels lifted off her feet so they wouldn’t strike the hardwood too sharply. The purse set down too softly on the console table in the foyer. The little pause before she looked toward the staircase, always checking whether I was still asleep or only pretending.
That night, I was pretending.
The digital clock on my nightstand glowed 4:07 in thin red lines against the dark. Our bedroom was lit only by the slatted light of the city outside, Los Angeles still awake beneath the hills, headlights moving in distant quiet streams beyond the glass. I lay on my back with my breathing flattened out, my phone loose in one hand under the comforter, staring at the ceiling fan’s shadow turning slowly overhead. Sarah pushed open the bedroom door a fraction, enough to slip through. She was holding her shoes in one hand. Her black dress—the one she claimed she only wore to “important client dinners”—was wrinkled across the hips,...
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