“Just not here. Not tonight.”
Milo grabbed his phone from the coffee table, started dialing. I watched him try Hazel’s number once, twice, three times. Each call going straight to voicemail.
“She’s not answering,” he said, panic creeping into his voice. “Why isn’t she answering?”
“Maybe she’s busy,” I suggested, my tone flat.
He tried again. And again. I counted twenty-three calls over the next hour while he paced our living room, each one going unanswered. He switched to texting, his thumbs flying across the screen.
“Something’s wrong,” he kept saying. “Hazel always answers. Something must have happened.”
I almost laughed at the irony. The woman he destroyed our marriage for was now leaving him in the lurch. But I kept my face neutral and said nothing.
Around midnight, when it became clear Hazel wasn’t going to respond, Milo finally grabbed some clothes and left. I heard him on the phone in the hallway, calling his brother Ryan, asking if he could crash there for a few days.
I locked the door behind him and stood in the sudden silence of the apartment. Our apartment. My apartment now.
Then I poured myself another glass of wine and waited.
The next morning, I woke to seventeen missed calls from Milo. I ignored all of them and made coffee.
Around ten, he showed up at the door. I didn’t let him in, just stood in the doorway, blocking his entrance.
“Hazel’s gone,” he said.
He looked like he hadn’t slept. His eyes were bloodshot, his clothes wrinkled.
“She called in sick to work. ‘Indefinite leave.’ Her roommate said she packed up and left last night. Just disappeared.”
“Okay,” I said.
“That’s all you have to say?” His voice rose. “Isla, she won’t answer my calls. She won’t respond to texts. I went to her apartment and her roommate said she seemed upset, said something about needing space, and just left. Where would she go?”
“I have no idea, Milo. She’s your girlfriend. You should know her better than I do.”
“Don’t call her that.” He ran his hands through his hair. “It’s not… it wasn’t like that.”
“Wasn’t it? You signed a lease with her. Picked out furniture. Planned a life together. What would you call it?”
He had no answer for that.
“I need to come in,” he said. “Get more of my things.”
“Fine. You have ten minutes.”
I stepped aside.
He moved through the apartment like a ghost, gathering clothes, toiletries, his laptop. I watched him from the doorway, sipping my coffee, feeling nothing.
“I’m going to fix this,” he said as he was leaving. “I’m going to figure out what happened with Hazel, and then I’m going to fix things with you. With us.”
“There is no ‘us’ anymore, Milo.” I started closing the door. “The sooner you accept that, the easier this will be.”
What Milo didn’t know—what I hadn’t told him—was that I knew exactly where Hazel had gone.
And I knew exactly why.
On day nine of Milo’s trip, while I was deep into my investigation, I discovered something about Hazel that changed everything. Her social media profiles were set to private, but her husband’s weren’t.
Marcus Whitaker. High school English teacher. His Instagram was public, filled with family photos. Hazel, Marcus, two little girls—maybe seven and nine years old—at the beach, at birthday parties, on camping trips. The most recent photo from three weeks ago showed them at a pumpkin patch. The caption read:
“Fall family time. So grateful for these three.”
Hazel had a family. A husband. Children. Two little girls who called her Mommy and had no idea their mother was planning to leave them for my husband.
I’d stared at those photos for an hour, feeling sick. Those children. Those innocent children who were about to have their lives destroyed.
I’d agonized over what to do for a full day. It wasn’t my place to blow up Hazel’s life. Wasn’t my responsibility to tell her husband what she’d done. But then I’d thought about Marcus. About how he was being lied to, just like I was. About how he deserved to know the truth before Hazel could spin her own version of events.
I’d created an anonymous email account, attached every piece of evidence I had—the Instagram photos, the hotel receipts, the text messages between Hazel and Milo planning their future together. I titled the email simply:
“I’m sorry you have to find out this way.”
And I’d sent it to Marcus’s school email address, which was listed on the high school’s website.
Three days after Milo came home, my phone rang from an unknown number.
“Is this Isla Brennan?” The voice was male, hoarse, like he’d been crying.
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“Marcus Whitaker. Hazel’s… Hazel’s husband.”
He paused.
“I think we need to talk about our spouses.”
We met at a small coffee shop in Brooklyn the next afternoon. I recognized him immediately from his Instagram photos, though he looked older now. Tired. His eyes were kind but sad.
“Thank you for meeting me,” he said as we sat down with our coffees. “I know this must be strange.”
“No stranger than anything else that’s happened this week.”
He pulled out his phone.
“Did you send me that email? The anonymous one?”
I hesitated, then nodded.
“I’m sorry. I know it wasn’t my place, but—”
“Don’t apologize.” He set his phone on the table between us. “I needed to know. I deserved to know.”
He looked at me.
“How long have you known about them?”
“Eight days. You?”
“Four.”
He rubbed his face.
“Hazel told me she was going to Florida for a girls’ trip. Old college friends. Said they’d been planning it for months. She sent me photos every day—beaches, restaurants—telling me she missed me and the girls.”
Milo had told me it was a work trip to Miami. “Critical client pitch.” Sent me photos of conference rooms.
Marcus shook his head.
“They coordinated everything. The timing. The lies. She even used old photos of our daughters and posted them as Instagram stories so I’d think everything was normal.”
I showed him my credit card statements.
“They charged everything to our joint accounts. $480 for a couples’ massage. Romantic dinners every night.”
“I found their lease,” Marcus said quietly. “For the apartment in Williamsburg. She told me she’d withdrawn fifteen thousand from our savings for a teaching certification program. It was her half of their secret love nest.”
His voice cracked.
“My daughters’ college fund. She stole from her own children.”
We sat in silence for a moment.
“How old are your girls?” I asked.
“Seven and nine. Mara and Sophie.”