He froze in the doorway the second he saw me holding the phone. Not nervous — terrified.
I showed him the flight bookings and the message: “Can’t wait to see you again.”
“Want to explain this?” I asked.
He sat down quietly, staring at the floor for a long second before saying,
“It’s not an affair.”
Yeah, sure.
But then he told me something I never expected.
For almost a year, he’d been secretly flying to Idaho to visit his biological mother — the woman who abandoned him as a kid. She found him through a DNA site a while back, and he’d been meeting her in private ever since. He said he was ashamed for wanting a relationship with someone who hurt him so badly, and scared I’d think he was weak for going back.
Then he looked at me and said,
“I didn’t lie because I don’t love you. I lied because I didn’t know how to talk about this without falling apart.
