I Found His Second Phone.

The phone was under the spare wheel, in a compartment that had been designed by a manufacturer for a jack, and it had been there for long enough that the screen protector had lifted at one corner.

Alina found it on a Saturday, while looking for the tyre pressure gauge, two days after she had noticed that her husband had started taking the car to a car wash eleven minutes from their house when there was a perfectly good one at the end of the street.

She had spent the following four days doing the thing she was later least proud of, which was imagining a woman. She had given her a name, an age, a job, and a reasonable grievance. She had rehearsed three different sentences in the shower, all of them calm, only one of which was.

On the Wednesday she charged the phone in the utility room with a towel over it, and it booted into a home screen with four apps, a camera roll of twenty-two photographs, and one pinned conversation with no contact name.

She opened it, because there was no version of that evening in which she did not.

There were sixty-eleven messages. She read the last four.

The last one had been sent at 07:12 that morning, which was eleven minutes after she had left the house for work.