I tell her about the photos.

On the drive home I turn to Sarah and ask “Did you ever get a chance to look at Wiley’s computer.”

Sarah give me a loving smile “No why?”

“He has secret pictures of you, on it…”

Sarah laughs “Liam… we still have 2 hours before we are home… don’t start getting yourself worked up now…”

I glance from the road to her and give her a stern look so she knows I am not joking "Honey this isn’t about sex… He actually has secret photos on you on his computer!”

Sarah face terns to a little worry as she defects “Liam I thought you got over your disliking of him enough to no makeup stories.”

I pull the car to the nearest off ramp causing to ask, “Wait where are we going.”

I laugh “Since you don’t believe me, I am going to take you back and show you…”

Sarah face falls into disgust “You're really not joking are you…”

“No, I am being dead serious.”

Sarah face freaks out “When did you see them.”

“When you were fucking him.”

Sarah “And you let me stay there the hole night knowing he has than… fuck I probably has a hidden camera or something in the shower… Shit I took a shower before we left… Why didn’t you make us leave the moment you found them.”

Realizing that i was starting to take the blame for this I got on the defensive “Sarah I told you that he had something like this countless times, and it never seem to bother you them…”

Sarah “Yeah because I thought you were just making up some lie because you didn’t like him or something… I never thought he would actually do something like that… Fuck Liam, Wiley and I grew up together… How could he…”

I laugh victoriously “I told you he was a perverted pig and you never believed me.”

Sarah's face crumples as the full weight of the violation hits her. "Oh shit, Liam. Those photos... I trusted him completely." Her voice breaks. "I let him... we just... and he's been collecting pictures of me like some kind of sick trophy collection?"

I reach over and squeeze her hand. "I'm sorry. I should have stopped it the moment I saw them, but I was so shocked and then everything happened so fast..."

"No, you're right to be angry with me," she says, wiping tears from her eyes. "All those times you warned me about him and I defended him. I called you jealous and paranoid." She shudders. "The way he touched me in the pool, how he kept talking about loving me... it wasn't romantic, it was possessive. Like I was already his."

I pull back onto the highway, heading home instead of returning to Wiley's. "What do you want to do about this?"

Sarah stares out the window for a long moment. "I need to think. This changes everything about our childhood, about our friendship. Every innocent moment I thought we shared... was he planning this even then?"

Her phone buzzes with a text message. She glances at it and her face goes pale.

"It's from him," she whispers. "He's asking when we can 'continue what we started' and if I enjoyed our 'private time' as much as he did."

“What are you going to tell him?”

Her voice cracks “I don’t know… after what you told me I don’t know if I can talk to him ever again.”

“Then why don’t you just block him.”

She nods before hitting the block icon on her phone and setting it aside.

I notice her hands trembling as she puts the phone down. "Good," I say, feeling a weight lift off my shoulders. "You should have done that years ago."

Sarah leans back in her seat, staring at the ceiling. "I feel so stupid, Liam. All those times he'd show up at my parents' house when I was visiting, insisting on 'catching up' in my old room. I thought he was just being nostalgic."

"He was probably memorizing every detail so he could fantasize about it later," I say, unable to keep the disgust from my voice.

She shudders. "The worst part is... last night when we were... I could feel how **** he was. How he kept trying to make it about love instead of just sex. Now I know why." Her voice drops to a whisper. "He's been building up this sick romantic fantasy about me for years."

I reach over and take her hand. "Hey, it's over now. You'll never have to see him again."

Sarah squeezes my fingers. "But what about you? Don't you work with him sometimes?"

I hadn't thought about that. "Yeah, occasionally. But I can handle Wiley Henderson."

Seeing Wiley around the office after all of that was a special kind of ****. He owns the company I work for so I couldn't avoid running into him in the breakroom or passing him in the halls. The first time he cornered me, it was a Tuesday, still early enough in the week that the coffee hadn't burnt me out. I was microwaving my lunch—leftover pasta Sarah had made for us—and Wiley sidled up next to me, all nerves and sweat, and hissed, "Why isn't Sarah returning my messages? Did you say something to her?"

There was a time when I would have made up a lie, tried to smooth things over for the sake of the company or my own skin, but truth had a way of rising through me now. "That's between you and her," I said, not looking at him, "just like the stuff you did in your room." The way his jaw worked, like he was chewing on broken glass, gave me a weird satisfaction. He never asked again—at least not to my face. But I caught him watching me sometimes, from the copy machine or the glass-walled conference rooms, as if he was trying to suss out whether I would ruin him. Maybe I could have. Maybe I should have. Rumors are currency in office politics, and a well-placed word might have saved others from his brand of affection. Still, I kept it to myself. The less Wiley bled into my life, the better.

Without Wiley around, our sex is not as good, but it also allows our lives to go back to normal. It’s like a bad habit you wean yourself off of: there’s relief at first, and then a residue of boredom that feels like guilt, but with less teeth. Sarah and I learned to fill the gaps with ordinary things—grocery lists, binge-watched shows, arguments about whose turn it was to buy toilet paper. On weekends, we tried to retool our rituals, picking new restaurants instead of returning to the ramen joint where we used to run into Wiley when we where in high school. When we finally did eat there, months later, I watched Sarah scan the room as if expecting him to appear, and I realized I’d been doing the same.

In bed, we tried to find a new rhythm. The rawness was gone, replaced by a gentler sort of affection that felt both like a regression and a small mercy. If she noticed that I missed the friction, she never said it out loud. Instead, we navigated around the absence, learning to be together again without the gravitational pull of a third person’s memory. Sarah started doing crosswords before bed, and I watched her mouth the answers, sometimes getting them wrong on purpose just to see if I’d correct her. I always did.

One night, in the dark, she whispered, “Do you think he’s moved on?”

I shrugged, not trusting myself to answer.

She turned to face me, her eyes silhouetted in the blue light from her phone. “I want to stop thinking about him. I want us to be okay.”

“We are okay,” I said, and almost believed it.

We kept moving forward, step by cautious step, as if retracing our old lives out of muscle memory. The drama was gone, but so was the threat of everything falling apart. And for now, that was enough.

****

Thank you for reading. If you want more the other option before this chapter is longer. I just wanted to give an off ramp for those that wanted it.