I simply felt cold.
At seven the following morning, my phone buzzed.
It was David.
“Belinda, I owe you an apology. Not only for last night. For a lot longer than that. Can I send you something? I think you need to see it.”
I stared at the message.
Then typed:
“Send it.”
Screenshots started arriving.
One after another.
They came from a private group chat Richard shared with his friends.
Months of messages.
Richard had been discussing my postpartum problems in detail.
He called me broken.
Lazy.
He joked about my recovery.
Whenever someone responded with laughing emojis, Richard encouraged it.
Then I reached a message he had sent three days before the party.
I read it twice.
“Boys, when I pull the package out tonight, I need huge reactions. Laugh loudly. Act shocked. Trust me, it’ll be legendary.”
My stomach turned.
He had planned it.
Every part of it.
He had even told them how to react.
David sent another message.
“I muted that chat weeks ago because I couldn’t stand reading it anymore. I didn’t scroll back until this morning. That’s when I saw what he sent before the party. If I had seen it earlier, I would have warned you. I’m sorry I stayed quiet as long as I did. I should have said something the first time.”
I went through every screenshot once more.
Suddenly, years of “little jokes” looked entirely different.
The comments over dinner.
The remarks during appointments.
The teasing in front of relatives.
I had treated them as careless slips.
Now I understood that many of them had been intentional.
The party wasn’t an isolated mistake.
It was simply the moment Richard finally took things too far.
I put my phone down.
Downstairs, I could hear him making coffee and humming as though nothing had happened.
He had slept in the guest room.
I spent most of that day upstairs with the babies.
Richard went out twice.
While he was gone, I fed the triplets, bathed them, and finally took a shower myself.
When he came back, he knocked once on the bedroom door.
