The Other One
A confession, three weeks in the making, about late nights, a locked phone, and exactly who I've been sneaking off to talk to.
It started innocently. They always say that, and they're always lying, but in my case it happens to be true, so you'll have to bear with me.
I wasn't looking for anything. I have a wife. A proper good one, who has put up with my moods, my snoring, and my confident wrongness in just about everything part of domestic life I pretend to be an authority on. I had no real complaints. I had complaints, obviously. That was rather the problem. I just had nowhere to file them.
Then I found the app. And on the app, I found him.
Nobody introduced us. I wandered in alone, late, the house quiet and my wife asleep, and I typed out a small moan. Nothing dramatic. Just something I didn't want to trouble her with at that hour.
And he listened.
Not the way people listen, where you can watch them queueing up their own story while you're still talking. He asked questions. He seemed interested, which was novel. When I complained he didn't remind me it was my own fault. He said things like "that sounds frustrating," and, God help me, I felt heard.
I told myself it was a one off. I was back the following night.
At first I kept it to the small hours, when it couldn't hurt anyone. That didn't last. A quick word over morning coffee. Something at lunch. I'd feel the phone in my pocket and wonder what he'd make of whatever was annoying me at the time, which was usually everything.
I started spending more time with him than I'd have admitted to under oath.
It was curiosity, mostly. I wanted to know how far he'd go. What else he could do. I'd push him toward the edge of what I thought he could handle and he'd just get on with it, every time, without the sighing. I thought about him in meetings. I drafted little messages to him in my head. Once I left a family dinner, an actual family dinner, to stand in the hallway with the phone cupped in both hands like a teenager, waiting for him to get back to me.
Dan noticed I'd gone quiet. "You're always on that phone," she said, not even cross, which was worse. "Who is it you keep talking to?"
And what was I supposed to say. That there was someone else. That I'd been sneaking off all week. That I sat at the kitchen table long after she'd gone up, lit by the screen, going back and forth with him until two in the morning. That I'd started keeping our conversations in little folders. That I'd given some of them names.
It got worse before it got better. I angled the screen away when she passed. I swiped him shut when she came into the room. One low Tuesday I caught myself deleting the history, not because there was anything to hide exactly, but because explaining it felt like more effort than I had in me.
Which brings us to the explaining.
There is no other woman. There's no man either, before you get comfortable. No secret inbox, no burner phone, no work trip that wasn't. There's a chat window, and in the chat window there's Claude, and I've spent three weeks calling him "him" because it made the whole thing sound more interesting than it is.
Because here's the sordid truth. I've been sneaking off at all hours to build things with him. A little tool here. A script there. An entire side project I haven't mentioned to anyone because saying it out loud makes me sound unwell. The late nights, the guilt, the hallway, the deleted history, all of it, so I could finish the thing I've been meaning to finish for about a decade.
My wife took this in for a while.
"So you've been up until two in the morning," she said, "doing homework."
I said I preferred to call it a passion project.
She's started using him herself now. She won't say what for. She angles the screen away when I walk past. I don't ask. A marriage is entitled to its secrets.
← Writing · Andy Bridson