The Buzzing I Pretended Not to Hear

The ring had been sitting in my sock drawer for three weeks the night I finally looked at her phone.

It was a modest thing, a half-carat I'd financed in eleven payments, but I'd held it up to the kitchen window and watched it throw little fractured rainbows across the wall and thought, yes, this is it, this is the rest of my life. I'd been saving since spring. Skipping lunches. Telling Priya I couldn't do the weekend trips because work was slammed, when really I was hoarding every spare dollar like a man digging a tunnel.

So I should have been the happiest I'd ever been. Instead I was lying awake at two in the morning, again, listening to her phone buzz against the nightstand.

It had started small. A single vibration around midnight, then quiet. Then it became a rhythm. Buzz. Pause. Buzz-buzz. The screen would flare and paint a pale rectangle on the ceiling, and she'd reach over without opening her eyes and turn it face-down with the ease of someone who had practiced.

"It's the regional group chat," she murmured once, when she felt me stir. "The overnight shift always blows it up. Go back to sleep."

And I did. That's the part I'm most ashamed of. I wanted the version of her that was true so badly that I built it myself, brick by brick, every night. Regional group chat. Overnight shift. A reasonable woman with a reasonable explanation.

The night I broke, she was in the shower and the phone buzzed on the counter and I just picked it up. No drama. I didn't even feel like myself. I felt like a man watching another man's hand reach out.

There were four of them.

Not one. Four separate threads, all live, all blinking, all from that night. Names I didn't know. Photos I won't describe. She was scheduling them like a dispatcher, slotting one in for Thursday, pushing another to the weekend, apologizing to a third for being "so booked lately, lol."

I could have survived even that, maybe. People are weak; I've been weak. But then I scrolled, and in the thread with the one she clearly liked best, there was a message about me.

She'd called me her *training wheels.* Said I was sweet and boring and that I'd probably propose any day now because I was "the type." Said it with a laughing emoji. He'd written back, *so you gonna say yes?* and she'd put, *obviously, free rent until something better comes along.*

The shower was still running. Steam was curling under the bathroom door. I set the phone back exactly where it had been, face-down, the way she liked it.

I went to the bedroom, took the velvet box out of my sock drawer, and put it in my coat pocket. Then I sat on the edge of the bed and waited for her to come out with wet hair and that soft, sleepy smile she gave me every night, the one I'd believed was for me.

I let her smile at me one last time. Then I told her I'd heard the buzzing all along.