My Fiancé Promised His Mistress Two More Months

I started keeping a mental list.

Not on paper. Not in my phone. Just in my head, the way I used to track overdue invoices back in Seattle when I couldn't afford accounting software — a running tab of things that didn't add up, held quietly in the back of my mind while the rest of me went on functioning normally.

The late nights first. Jericho had always worked long hours, and I'd never questioned it. But now I counted them differently. Three Tuesdays in a row. A Thursday that stretched past midnight. Each time, a business dinner, a client in from London, a deal that needed closing. Plausible. Always plausible. I thought about how many times I'd nodded and said 'of course' and turned back to whatever I was doing, and I felt something cold move through my chest.

Then the weekends. There had been a gallery opening in April that Jericho said was 'just the guys.' I'd stayed home and reorganized the linen closet. Two weeks later, I saw a photo on someone's Instagram — a group shot from the opening, Jericho in the center, Azalea on his left with her hand on his shoulder and her head tilted toward him like she was telling him a secret. I'd looked at it for a long time. Then I'd put my phone down and gone to bed.

I hadn't let myself think about it then. I was thinking about it now.

His phone, always face-down on the table. Every table, every room, every meal. I'd assumed it was a habit. A lot of people did that. I did that sometimes. But I thought about the way his hand would move to it when it buzzed — not to check it, just to press it flatter against the surface, a small, automatic gesture, like covering something up.

I didn't confront him. There was nothing to confront yet. Just a list of things that could all be explained, individually, by something reasonable. I knew how that worked. I'd watched my mother explain away a hundred things that way, one at a time, until the pile of reasonable explanations became its own kind of evidence.

I wasn't my mother. I was going to be sure before I did anything at all.

---

The charity gala committee met on Wednesday mornings in a private room at a hotel on Park Avenue. It was one of the social obligations I'd taken on when Jericho and I got engaged — the kind of thing that came with the life, like learning which fork to use and how to make conversation with people who would never fully let you in.

Azalea was always there. She'd been on the committee for years, and she ran it the way she ran every room she entered — with the easy authority of someone who had never once been made to feel like a guest.

I sat across from her and watched her work.

'Jericho and I were just talking about the venue last week,' she said, not to me specifically, just to the table. 'He thinks the rooftop is underused. Which, honestly, same — we had the best time up there in May, remember?' She glanced at the woman beside her, who smiled and nodded. Then, as an afterthought, she looked at me. 'Before your time, I think.'

Before your time.

She said it lightly. Conversationally. The way you'd mention a restaurant that had since closed. I kept my expression pleasant and made a small note on the legal pad in front of me.

She did it twice more in the next twenty minutes. A vacation in Montauk — 'God, that summer, Jericho was impossible, you know how he gets when he hasn't slept.' A renovation detail about the penthouse — the specific measurements of the primary bathroom, the argument over the heated floors — information that required more than a casual visit to possess.

The other women at the table exchanged glances. Small ones. The kind that happen fast and get covered over immediately. Nobody said anything.

I wrote down the heated floors detail on my legal pad, underneath the venue notes, and underlined it once.

---

Azalea's phone rang just before eleven. She glanced at the screen, said 'one second' to no one in particular, and pushed back her chair.

She left her MacBook open on the table.

I noticed it the way I noticed everything now — automatically, without deciding to. The screen was bright. A Messages thread, pulled up full-width, the kind of window you leave open when you're in the middle of something and expect to be right back.

I read the first visible line from where I was sitting.

Then I picked up my phone.

My hands were steady. I was aware of that in a distant, clinical way — the steadiness, the absence of trembling — while somewhere underneath it my heart was hitting my ribs so hard I could feel it in my throat. I opened the camera. I kept my movements small and unhurried, the way you move when you don't want anyone to remember that you moved at all.

I took three photos.

The thread was between Azalea and Jericho. The timestamps were recent. The language was not the language of old friends.

*She's sweet, but she'll never be one of us. You know that, right?*

And below it, his response — not a denial, not a correction, just a string of words that confirmed he had read it and agreed with the premise and moved on.

*Two more months of this performance and then it's just us again, I promise.*

I lowered my phone. I looked at the legal pad in front of me. The venue notes. The heated floors. The underline.

Azalea came back into the room, already talking, sliding back into her chair with the fluid ease of a woman who had never once had to think about how she occupied space. She pulled the MacBook toward her without looking at the screen and closed it.

'Sorry,' she said. 'Where were we?'

'The rooftop,' someone said.

'Right.' She smiled. 'The rooftop.'

I clicked my pen and wrote something on the legal pad that had nothing to do with the gala. I wrote it small, in the margin, where no one would see it.

*Two months.*

I circled it. Then I turned the page and kept taking notes, and my face gave away absolutely nothing, and the meeting went on.