I remember that mid-April morning. Saigon was unbearably hot, as if the air itself was ready to ignite. And maybe, so was my heart.
I never imagined that day, while making coffee and taking my child to school like always, would mark the moment my marriage began to fracture beyond repair. It started with a string of strange messages on his phone. Invitations to female colleagues to eat, to hang out, casual and harmless-seeming, but enough to make a wife's intuition flinch.
Then something straight out of a cheap drama happened. He went into the pharmacy below our apartment with a woman. Later, I learned the bitterness hit harder when I realised the customer who walked in that day was my sister, witnessing him and his colleague buying emergency contraception.
I tried to stay calm, but inside a tsunami raged. I sent him a short, cold message, sharp as a blade.
"Are you seeing someone?"
No reply. No dots, no excuse. Silence. And I knew. Silence is rarely about not knowing what to say. It is about being caught exactly where it hurts the most.
We still shared a phone password, our first daughter's birthday. He had not changed it yet, probably thinking I would trust him forever.
I opened the phone, my heart trembling, not from fear, but from a flood of premonitions crashing all at once. I scrolled through Grab and Be. Then an address popped up repeatedly. Familiar. I had been there before, even delivering things to him, thinking he was on a business trip.
How absurd. I had been the loyal, diligent, thoughtful wife, bringing him supplies by hand so he could have something to wear while with another woman.
That April never brought rain, but I was drenched in the storm of betrayal.