Chapter 2She Paid 999 Dollars For A Cake, Yet I’m The One Being Judged

Sarah's excuse was airtight, but the dark cloud of suspicion in my chest refused to dissipate. If anything, it grew heavier.

I couldn't sit still. The words on my laptop screen blurred into meaningless static. I frantically combed through our recent interactions, desperate to find a single crack in her story.

Eleanor was the senior director at Sarah's firm. She was in her late forties, perpetually single, and had always taken Sarah under her wing. It made perfect sense for Sarah to cover a luxury expense for her.

Why, then, did my instincts scream that something was deeply wrong?

Driven by a ghost of an impulse, I opened our shared iCloud photo album. It was a digital scrapbook we had maintained for years, a place where we could catch glimpses of each other's daily lives.

The most recent upload was from yesterday evening. A picture of the sunset outside her hotel window, captioned with a simple "Miss you."

Everything appeared painfully normal.

I refreshed the page out of habit. The screen blinked, and a cold notification popped up. The shared album I had created seven years ago, holding tens of thousands of our memories, displayed a blunt message: "This shared album has been deleted."

My chest seized.

I immediately texted Sarah.

"Honey, what happened to the cloud album? I can't see anything."

Five agonizing minutes passed before she replied.

"Huh?"

"I have no idea. Maybe my phone is glitching. Let me restart it and try again."

"Don't worry about it, babe."

Ten minutes later, she sent a screenshot showing a generic network error, claiming she couldn't connect to the cloud servers.

It was the exact same excuse she had used about the hotel's bad Wi-Fi.

Once could be a coincidence. But twice?

My mind raced, and a reckless, toxic idea took root.

I was going to contact that shop.

I searched for Sweet Serendipity again, found their contact page, and used a burner number to message their customer service on WhatsApp.

The profile picture was a delicate macaron. The background image, however, was a silhouette of a man with defined abs frosting a cake. The implication was dripping with intent.

Once my request was accepted, I played the role of a curious client.

"Hi there. I saw your Afternoon Solace package and found it pretty intriguing. What exactly does the service entail?"

The representative instantly replied with a "shush" emoji, followed by an image file.

The picture detailed a comprehensive menu of services.

It ranged from "Sunshine Boy Companionship Reading" to "Mature Gentleman Wine Chat," and even an "Alpha Male Fitness Coaching" session. Each item had a different price point attached. The $999 tier was explicitly labeled as the "Boy-Next-Door Sweet Interaction" package.

Fighting down a wave of nausea, I kept typing.

"A friend of mine placed an order with you guys this afternoon. She had it sent to The Grand Plaza hotel. She said she was incredibly satisfied, so I'm thinking of giving it a try."

I deliberately dropped the name of the hotel Sarah was staying at.

The response was immediate.

"We are so thrilled your friend enjoyed our service."

"For privacy reasons, we cannot disclose specific order details."

"However, I can confirm that one of our gold-tier pastry chefs did visit The Grand Plaza this afternoon, and the client feedback was absolutely stellar."

A gold-tier pastry chef.

I clenched my fists so hard my fingernails dug deep into my palms.

The final wall of my denial crumbled into dust.

Sarah was lying. She hadn't just bought the service. She was incredibly satisfied with her "pastry chef."

I slumped into my office chair, my entire body drained of strength. Flashbacks of our life together assaulted me. Sharing cheap street food near our college campus, when she would always save the best bites for me. Squeezing into a tiny studio apartment, dreaming about the big house we would own one day. The agonizing hours she spent in the delivery room, culminating in the most radiant, beautiful smile the second she laid eyes on our daughter.

Was all of it a lie?

How could the woman who looked at me like I hung the moon be in another city, smiling at another man, and then lying to my face with such effortless grace?

I pulled her MacBook from the drawer. It held all our travel photos and home videos. My fingers trembled as I typed in our password, but the screen shook with an incorrect password prompt.

I froze. We had used the same login credential for seven years.

I tried our daughter's birthday, my birthday, our anniversary. Every single one failed.

Just as I was about to give up, a dark, cynical impulse guided my fingers. I typed in "sweetserendipity."

The welcome screen materialized.