I walked back to the office like a dead man walking. No joke. People saw me and smiled, tossed me a "how's it going?" like I was fine, and I just nodded. My face felt like someone else's mask. Inside, everything had seceded. The part of me that laughed at stupid jokes, that argued numbers in meetings, that flirted with small talk—gone. Evacuated. Evicted by one stupid scene behind a cracked door.
Sitting at my desk felt obscene. My computer screen showed charts and stupid blue graphs, but the numbers meant nothing. I opened my email and the sentences slid off me like rain off a coat. My hands—fuck, my hands—kept getting sweaty and then cold. I kept replaying her laugh. Her voice inside my skull like an audio loop set to torture. Haha, welcome home, dear. Welcome to the knife.
People asked if I was okay. I lied. I said, "Yeah, just tired." Tired? Tired my ass. I wanted to scream. I wanted to smash something. I wanted to throttle someone until their eyes popped and they begged for mercy. But there's a small, cruel literacy to despair: it teaches you patience. At least, it taught me that day.
I flicked through the photos on my phone like someone checking bullets. Evidence. That's what they were. Silent, cruel rectangles that said: you were betrayed. I showed myself the images until they became banal—until they lost the sharpness of their sting and became facts. Facts are useful. Facts can be used. Emotions are messy and loud. Facts? You can point at them in a court, hand them to a lawyer, hammer them into a narrative.
Then the thought came, slow like rot: if I rushed in, if I exploded, she'd win. She'd play the victim—tears, sobs, the "he's unstable" act—and the world would side with her. People eat dramatic suffering; they love to take sides. I couldn't let that be the story. Not without a fight. Not without a plan.
So I did something I never thought I would: I became cold. Not the cool, smug kind—no, colder. Like iron left in the freezer. I started listing options in my head, clinical and stupidly calm.
Option one: Confront her publicly. Risky. Emotion-led. Could blow up in my face.
Option two: Hire a lawyer, build a case. Slow. Effective. Expensive. Humiliating—but on my terms.
Option three: Destroy her life silently. Leak things to the right people. Make her social circle shrink. Cut her away from the safety net that lets her smile so easy. Petty? Maybe. Effective? Maybe.
Option four: Walk away. Take my dignity and go. Let her live with what she did. Live small, hold my head up. That one tasted of ash. It felt like surrender.
I wrote this shit down. Little notes on a napkin. Names. Times. Places. People who mattered to her. Friends who always laughed a bit too loud. Her boss. A cousin. I started to map her world like a city plan; if you hit the right intersections, the whole traffic collapses.
There was rage, yes—bright and hot like a fresh wound—but under that was a colder thing: hunger for control. She'd taken my certainty; I would take back the narrative. I'd make sure when people said her name, it didn't taste sweet anymore. I'd make her stand naked in a room full of witnesses, exposed in quiet, meticulous ways. Not for blood. For balance.
At the end of the day I sat in the park across from the office, head in my hands, and laughed. Not a good laugh—hollow, bitter. People passed, couples holding hands, dogs barking. It all looked obscene. I kept thinking: she said "welcome home." She wouldn't understand what that meant anymore. Not to me. Not after today.
I felt the first real clarity: revenge isn't a single act. It's a long, boring, painful craft. You don't light a match and walk away. You build a slow-burning engine and you feed it pieces of the other person until there's nothing left to feed.
And damn, I wanted to feed it.
Tonight I would sleep—if sleep decides to come—but tomorrow I would start cutting. Small cuts. Surgical. Precise. The kind that don't scream but bleed steady.
I tucked the phone into my pocket and felt its weight like a loaded gun. Then I looked up at the sky, darkening, and whispered to nobody, "Welcome home, stranger."