The face on the screen did not belong to a stranger. It did not belong to a secret lover from Amanda’s past, or some's' smooth-talking colleague from her office.
It was my face.
I sat frozen in the flickering neon glow of the motel sign bleeding through the cheap window curtains. The plastic keys of my laptop casing dug into my fingertips as I gripped the edges of the desk, my knuckles turning a sharp, bloodless white. I leaned so close to the monitor that the pixels began to separate into tiny, jagged squares of red, green, and blue.
There was no mistake. The man standing in my entryway, letting my wife take his coat, was me.
He had my exact build—the slight slouch in the left shoulder from an old college football injury, the precise trim of the dark brown hair, the sharp line of the jaw. He was even wearing the charcoal gray blazer I had bought for a corporate gala three months ago. The same blazer that was currently hanging in the cramped, musty closet of room 114, less than three feet away from me.
On the screen, Amanda smiled up at him. It wasn’t the polite, tired smile she gave me when I came home from a long flight to Seattle or Chicago. It was radiant. It was the look she used to give me five years ago, back when we lived in that drafty third-floor apartment in downtown Portland, drinking cheap Pinot Noir out of coffee mugs and talking until the sun came up.
She took the blazer from his shoulders. He reached out, his hand gently brushing a stray lock of dark hair behind her ear, and whispered something that made her laugh aloud—a clear, musical sound that didn’t quite sync with the grainy audio feed of the home security app.
