A friend said the quiet part out loud
Her friend waited until the husbands went to look for parking. Then she leaned across the table, tapped one nail against her glass, and said, “You enjoy this more than you admit.”
There was no clean comeback. The evidence was sitting everywhere. The dress chosen to interrupt the room. The coworker story told like it was nothing. The vacation picture posted after midnight, then called random. Even her eye roll had gotten lazy, too slow to be convincing.
She looked down at the menu and laughed once. “Stop.”
But she smiled when she said it, and her friend saw that too.
The vacation photo was not about the crop
The first vacation photo went up at 9:08 and disappeared at 9:11. She said the crop looked weird.
The second one had the same waist, the same bare shoulder, the same hotel balcony behind her. Only the caption changed. Less joke, more blank space.
Her husband liked it without a comment. Two college friends liked it. Then came the name she had absolutely not been waiting for, except her thumb stayed over the screen too long. By morning she had filed the whole thing under vacation photo. Still, she knew which angle made the balcony look like background and her look like the point.
