They Always Sat a Meter Apart

The camera was meant to watch the dog.

We'd bought it the winter we adopted Biscuit, a nervous rescue greyhound who chewed the skirting boards whenever we left the house. I installed the little camera above the bookshelf so I could check on him from work and coo at him through the speaker. For two years that's all it ever showed me — a long grey dog asleep on a couch he wasn't allowed on.

I'm twenty-nine. My husband, Marcus, is thirty. We met at university in our second year, moved in together before we'd even graduated, and built the kind of quiet, easy life people roll their eyes at. Eight years. A rented house with a red door. A dog. I used to tell people he was the easiest person in the world to live with, and I believed it the way you believe in the floor under your feet.

The friend was Dana. I'd known her since our first job out of school — six years of birthdays and bad breakups and Sunday hikes. She and Marcus got on so well it made me proud. They went bouldering together at the climbing gym while I was at work, and they'd send me photos from the top of the wall, both of them grinning, chalk on their hands. I'm bisexual, and I've always had close friends of every gender, so the idea that I should be threatened by my husband having a female best friend felt small to me. Beneath me, even. I was the one who usually invited her over. Why would you suspect a thing you planned yourself?

If I ever did feel a flicker — and I did, I'm not going to pretend I didn't — I'd ask him, lightly, if anything had ever happened between them. He'd laugh and say the same thing every time. *We sat a meter apart the whole time. Promise.* He said it so often it became a joke between us. A meter apart. He'd hold his hands out to show me the distance, like a fisherman describing a catch.

The first crack came a month before our wedding. I found a second messaging account tied to a phone number I didn't recognise but somehow knew. When I asked him, he didn't just deny it — he got wounded. He sent me an article about number-spoofing scams. He told me my anxiety was "looking for a fight again," that maybe I just liked the drama. I have ADHD, and he had a way of turning that into a weapon, making my own brain the unreliable witness. So I apologised. I apologised to him. We got married three weeks later and I wore my mother's veil and I meant every word.

I found out the truth on an ordinary Tuesday, because of the dog.

I was at my desk and I opened the camera app out of habit, just to see Biscuit. But Biscuit wasn't on the couch. Two people were. It took my brain a long, merciful second to refuse what it was seeing, and then it couldn't refuse it anymore. Marcus. Dana. In my living room, under the camera I'd installed to watch over something I loved. The timestamp said it had been recorded the day before — while I was upstairs in the shower, humming, with no idea the floor of my life had already given way.

I called Dana first. She denied it before I'd even finished the sentence, her voice doing that bright, offended thing I'd heard her use on other people and never imagined she'd use on me. I hung up on her mid-word and I have not spoken to her since.

Then I called him, and Marcus broke. He cried. He confessed — but only to what the camera could prove. Since just before the wedding, he said. A terrible mistake. He still wanted me. He said I was the one he found beautiful, that he loved me, as if that word still had any structural integrity coming out of his mouth.

It took another week of pulling threads for the real shape of it to come out. It hadn't started before the wedding. It had started two months before he proposed to me. Over three years. Three years of bouldering photos and Sunday roasts and him complaining to me about her messy life while I drove her to appointments and paid for her dinners and sat up late helping her untangle her problems. He had told her he loved her too — not because it was true, he admitted, but because it kept her coming back. And there had been others I never knew about, paid for, hidden in a fold of our finances I'd never thought to check.

The part that still takes the air out of me isn't the sex. It's that for three years Dana sat at my table, ate the food I cooked, hugged me goodbye at my red door — and the whole time she was telling him, telling other people, that he deserved better than me. That I wasn't enough. I had cleaned her apartment when she was too depressed to get out of bed. I had been, by every measure I knew, a good friend and a good wife.

I keep coming back to that little joke of his. *A meter apart.* He must have laughed about it with her. It must have been their joke too.

The camera's gone now. So is the red door — I left the house, the dog came with me, and Biscuit sleeps on whatever couch he wants these days. Some nights I lie awake measuring out a meter in the dark with my hands, the exact distance he swore was always there, and I think about how the smallest lie a person tells you is usually just the part they let you see.