The first thing Simone noticed when she opened the app on her phone was the time stamp. 9:47 a.m. She had left for work at 8:30 that morning, kissed Derrick goodbye like she did every day, and told him she loved him. He had smiled at her, that same smile she’d fallen in love with 7 years ago, and said he’d see her tonight.
She’d walked out the door with her coffee in hand, believing she had a normal, happy marriage. now sitting in her car in the parking garage at 3:00 p.m. after a meeting got cancelled. She was scrolling through the nanny cam footage out of boredom. They didn’t have children yet, but she’d installed the cameras 2 years ago after a break-in on their street. Dererick knew about them.
They both checked them sometimes when they were away from home. Made them feel safe, but Dererick must have forgotten about the one in the bedroom. Or maybe he thought Simone would never check it. Or maybe he just didn’t care anymore. At 9:47 a.m., the bedroom door opened. Dererick walked in, but he wasn’t alone.
A woman followed him. A woman with long brown hair wearing a tight red dress. A woman who was laughing at something Dererick had said. A woman who reached for Dererick’s hand and pulled him toward the bed. Their bed. The bed with the blue comforter Simone had picked out last spring. The bed where she slept every single night next to the man she trusted with her whole heart.
Simone’s hand started shaking so badly she almost dropped her phone. She wanted to stop watching, wanted to close the app and pretend she’d never seen it. But she couldn’t. She sat frozen in her car, watching her husband kiss another woman, watching him unzip that red dress. Watching him lay this stranger down on their bed, watching him betray every promise he’d ever made to her.
The footage was clear, too clear. She could see everything. The way he touched this woman, the way he smiled at her, the way he looked at her with the same desire he used to show Simone. Or maybe he still showed Simone that look, but it was a lie now. Everything was a lie. Simone watched for 23 minutes.
23 minutes that destroyed her entire world. When it was over, when Dererick and the woman got dressed and left the bedroom, Simone finally moved. She gasped for air like she’d been drowning. Her chest hurt. Her stomach hurt. Everything hurt. She wanted to scream. She wanted to drive home right now and confront him. She wanted to call him and curse him out.
She wanted to know who this woman was, how long this had been going on, why he would do this to her. But instead, she sat in her car in the parking garage and cried silently for 10 minutes. Then she stopped crying. She wiped her face. She fixed her makeup using the mirror on her son visor and she went back to scrolling through the footage.
This happened today. Maybe it had happened before. Maybe there was more. She needed to know everything before she did anything. She went back one week. Same thing. 9:52 a.m. Derek and the same woman in their bedroom on their bed acting like Simone didn’t exist, like their marriage didn’t exist.
Like seven years of love and trust and promises meant nothing. Two weeks back again, same woman, same bed, same betrayal. Simone went back through two months of footage. It happened every single week, sometimes twice a week, always in the morning after Simone left for work. Always the same woman. Dererick had been doing this for months, right under her nose, in her own home, in her own bed. She felt sick.
She rolled down her car window and breathed in the cool air, trying not to throw up. Her phone buzzed with a text message. She looked down at the screen. It was from Derek. Hey babe, what do you want for dinner tonight? I can pick something up on my way home. Love you. Love you. The words made her want to throw her phone across the parking garage.
How dare he say that to her? How dare he act like everything was normal? How dare he lie so easily. Her hands moved across the phone screen before her brain could catch up. She typed back, “Anything is fine. Love you, too.” She hit send and immediately felt disgusted with herself. But she couldn’t let him know that she knew. Not yet.
She needed time to think, time to plan, time to figure out what to do next. Simone sat in her car for another 30 minutes thinking. She was a smart woman. She had a successful career in commercial real estate. She made good money. She was independent and strong. But right now….
Right now, she felt like the floor had been ripped out from under her, leaving her dangling over a precipice. However, as the initial shock began to recede, a cold, hard resolve took its place. Simone wiped the last smudge of mascara from under her eye. She wasn’t going to be the foolish wife who screamed and threw clothes on the lawn while he spun a web of excuses. She was going to handle this like she handled a hostile business takeover: with strategy, evidence, and absolute ruthlessness.
She spent the next hour downloading every single clip from the cloud to her phone and backing them up to a private external drive she kept in her laptop bag. She saved dates, times, and screenshots of the woman’s face. She zoomed in on the woman’s red dress, her jewelry, anything that could identify her. Once the evidence was secure, she called her bank and checked their joint accounts, looking for withdrawals that matched the dates of the trysts. Hotels, dinners, gifts—it was all there, a paper trail of infidelity financed by their shared income.
Driving home that evening was an out-of-body experience. Pulling into the driveway, she saw Derrick’s car already there. The house looked the same—the manicured lawn, the welcoming porch light—but it felt like walking onto a movie set where a horror film was being shot. She unlocked the door and forced a smile onto her face, a mask of porcelain that felt like it might crack at any moment.
“Hey, honey! I got Thai food,” Derrick called out from the kitchen. He walked over to kiss her, and Simone had to summon every ounce of willpower not to recoil. She let his lips touch hers, a brief, dry contact that made her skin crawl. He smelled of his cologne, but beneath it, she imagined she could smell the other woman’s perfume. “How was your day?” he asked, plating the food as if he hadn’t spent his morning defiling their marriage.
“Busy. Exhausting, actually,” Simone said, her voice steady. “I have a headache, so I might turn in early tonight.” She couldn’t sleep in that bed. Not tonight. Not ever again. She feigned a migraine and moved to the guest room, leaving Derrick watching TV, completely oblivious that the sword of Damocles was hanging over his head by a thread.
The next three days were a blur of calculated acting. Simone hired the city’s most aggressive divorce attorney, a shark named Eleanor who looked at the footage with a grim nod. “We have him cold,” Eleanor said. “In this state, infidelity impacts alimony and asset division. Since the house was purchased with your inheritance as the down payment and he’s been bringing a mistress into it, we can petition for immediate exclusive occupancy.”
On Friday, Simone decided it was time. She didn’t want a long, drawn-out fight. She wanted a surgical strike. She texted Derrick at noon: “Come home early. I have a surprise for you. Wear something nice.” She knew his ego would assume it was a romantic gesture.
When Derrick arrived at 6:00 p.m., the living room was dimly lit. Simone had set up a projector screen she usually used for work presentations. A bottle of wine sat on the coffee table, uncorked. Derrick grinned, loosening his tie. “Wow, babe. What’s the occasion? Anniversary came early?” He moved to hug her, but Simone took a step back, holding the remote control.
“Sit down, Derrick,” she said, her voice devoid of warmth. Her face was stone. The dim lighting hid the fact that her bags were packed and waiting by the back door, along with the process server who was waiting in her car down the street.
Confused, Derrick sat on the sofa. “Is everything okay? You’re acting weird.”
“I just wanted to watch a movie with you,” Simone said. “A home movie.” She pressed play.
The screen flickered to life. The timestamp read 9:47 a.m. from three days ago. Derrick’s smile froze. The color drained from his face so fast he looked like a corpse. He watched in silence as the bedroom door opened on the screen, and he and the woman in the red dress walked in. The audio was crisp; his laughter, the woman’s voice, the sounds of the zipper—it filled the silent living room like a siren.
“Simone, wait—” Derrick scrambled up, reaching for the projector. “Turn it off! Let me explain!”
“Sit down!” Simone’s voice cracked like a whip. “You don’t get to explain. You get to watch.” She let it play for another minute, enough for the reality to sink in, before pausing it on a freeze-frame of him kissing the stranger. “I have two months of this footage, Derrick. Every week. Sometimes twice a week. In my bed.”
Derrick slumped back, burying his head in his hands. “It meant nothing. She’s just a girl from the gym. It was stupid. I’m sorry, Simone, please. We can fix this.”
“We aren’t fixing anything,” Simone said, walking to the front door and opening it. “You broke it. Irreparably.”
She signaled to the car parked at the curb. A man in a cheap suit walked up the driveway, carrying a thick manila envelope. He stepped into the hallway, handed the envelope to a trembling Derrick, and said, “You’ve been served.”
“That is a restraining order and divorce papers,” Simone stated calmly, though her heart was pounding a frantic rhythm against her ribs. “You have thirty minutes to pack a bag and get out of my house. The police have been notified that I have a hostile situation here, and they are on standby if you refuse to leave. The locks are being changed in an hour.”
“You can’t do this,” Derrick whispered, looking around the room as if searching for an escape hatch. “This is my house too.”
“Not anymore,” Simone replied, her eyes dry and fierce. “And not after Eleanor gets done with you. Now, get your things. And Derrick? Don’t take the blue comforter. You’ve ruined it.”
She stood by the door, arms crossed, watching the man she once loved scramble to pack his life into a duffel bag. As he walked out the door, defeated and shamed, Simone didn’t feel happy, but she felt free. She closed the door, locked it, and finally, for the first time in days, took a breath of air that felt entirely her own.