My Girlfriend Became His Wife

Samantha and Patrick had been together for five years, a couple everyone assumed was on the verge of a ring. So when she claimed she had too much on her plate for Valentine's Day, he thought nothing of it and went for beers and barbecue with Mack and Simon. Then Simon's phone slid across the table: a photo from Samantha's own account, two hands holding a freshly stamped marriage certificate on the courthouse steps. The post vanished moments later, hidden from Patrick's view all along.

Patrick refuses to play the wounded man. She was just a girlfriend, he tells his friends, and whoever signed his name beside hers would have been the unlucky one. Behind the calm sits a year of arguments over Brett, the hometown boy she called a little brother, and her certainty that Patrick was the petty, insecure one for objecting.

He walks home through the February cold, relieved that no condo, no shared finances and no reception bind them. After two in the morning, Samantha's key turns in the lock, and she offers an apology about an office emergency and a weekend to make it up to him.