Chapter 3

Not long after Enya and I got married, I started noticing that she was smiling at her phone more and more often.

Whenever she was with me, she'd instinctively place it face down. And whenever she stayed late at work and came home, I could always catch a faint trace of an unfamiliar man's cologne on her clothes.

When I confronted her, she just sighed with irritation.

"I was smiling because someone sent something funny in the group chat. The phone thing is just a habit I picked up at work. And the cologne? If a client decides to wear it, should I ask him to change his cologne for my husband's sake?"

Still, I couldn't shake my suspicions.

I turned to Ryan for advice.

He leaned in and whispered, "If you notice something suspicious next time, don't confront her immediately. Find out the truth first. Don't give her any opportunity to talk her way out of it."

As fate would have it, the opportunity came much sooner than I expected.

Enya left on an unplanned business trip.

In one of the photos she sent to confirm she'd arrived safely, I spotted a man's silhouette reflected in the hotel window.

I called Ryan, hoping he could tell me what to do. But he never answered.

With no other options left, I rounded up a few of our mutual friends and drove straight to the hotel.

When we kicked the door open, we found Enya sitting on the bed in a bathrobe, while a man gently cradled her bare left leg in his hands.

The one thing I didn't anticipate was that it was Ryan.

As soon as Enya noticed the camera in my friend's hand, her expression changed entirely.

"Eric, have you lost your mind?"

I was trembling with fury, clenching my teeth so tightly that my jaw ached.

"What are the two of you doing together?"

Enya finally snapped. She slapped the phone away from my friend's hand.

"Ryan and I are in the same field," she said. "I brought him here to sit in on a case with me. I twisted my ankle when he came by to talk through the details, and he was just checking the injury. What exactly is going through your head right now?"

The cologne she had so casually attributed to a client, however, was unmistakably the one Ryan always wore.

I said nothing. I just walked over and took her phone.

There was only one contact pinned at the very top—Ryan.

When I scrolled through their messages, I realized they'd sent more texts in a single day than Enya and I had shared over the last half a year.

I felt the blood pounding in my skull as a chill swept through my body.

"So this is your group chat, your so-called work habit, and your male client? Enya, if nothing is going on, then why are you keeping me in the dark?"

"That's enough!"

Pain flashed across her face.

"Eric, take a good look at yourself. Do you even recognize the person you've become?"

She tossed two hotel key cards onto the floor at my feet.

"I kept it from you because I knew you'd jump to conclusions and start blaming Ryan. Everyone knows how good he's been to you all these years. How could you twist this into him being my lover?"

As soon as everyone saw those two key cards, even the friends who had come to back me up started exchanging awkward glances.

"Eric, maybe this really isn't what it looks like..."

Ryan suddenly dropped to his knees in front of me.

"I'm sorry, Eric. I should have handled this better. Please don't let this come between you two."

While everyone else was distracted, I noticed the fleeting grin that crossed his face.

I lost control for a moment, and before I could stop myself, I had already struck him.

"Ryan! I treated you as my closest friend, and this is how you repay me? By framing me?"

The next thing I felt was an even harder slap across my face.

It came from Enya.

"Is this how you treat your closest friend?" she snapped. "By bossing him around his entire life? Forcing him to abandon his dream of going to the country's best law school just to follow you to some mediocre university? Eric, how could you possibly justify that?"

The metallic taste of blood filled my mouth.

"How could I justify it?"

I laughed bitterly.

"Without me, your uncle would have sold you to a coal mine years ago! Ryan, my parents paid 20 thousand dollars to rescue you from that hell. Yes, you got into law school, but your uncle pocketed every single cent of your scholarship. You were the one who begged me to help.

"When my family went under, law school tuition was beyond what we could both afford. I took the money my parents had set aside for my studies overseas and shared it with you, but we still didn't have enough. You ended up having to apply to the same university as me because it cost less. And now this is what you're telling people about me?"

The room went silent. The only thing we could hear was Ryan's muffled sobbing.

Enya's expression darkened. She stepped in front of Ryan protectively.

"If you were really as generous as you claim, you wouldn't humiliate Ryan by airing his past in front of everyone."

She then helped Ryan up.

Without sparing me another look, the two of them walked away together.