I was standing in my own kitchen looking at Jude with his hand still on another woman's back.
"Maya, it's not about her body," my boyfriend blurted out — before I had even said a word.
I was standing in my own kitchen looking at Jude with his hand still on another woman's back.
Forty minutes earlier than he expected, I had come into my own flat and found him kissing her, with my half-eaten dinner on the counter beside them.
And the worst of it was not catching him.
It was what I did before I could stop myself, which is that I looked down at my own chest and compared myself to her — because that man had spent two years telling me he did not care about that sort of thing.
And for about one second I believed I was the problem.
And he came towards me. "Rue. Please. It's not about that."
And I laughed, and it was not a nice one. "I never said it was."
He had told me exactly what was in his head without my having to ask. I had not mentioned her body or mine or any difference between the two of us.
My hands went to pull my cardigan across and I caught them doing it and made them stop.
I was not going to stand in my own kitchen hiding myself from two people who had already shown me what they thought of me.
And he put his hand out. "Can we just talk?"
And I looked straight at him. "You made me feel stupid for being worried."
And I shoved him out of that doorway and swept his plate off the counter into the sink, and it went, and the whole flat went quiet.
And neither of them moved while I said: "Get out."
And that is the bit everybody wants. The plate. The other woman. His face when he worked out I was not going to ask him to stay.
But there is one thing nobody has ever asked me about.
After they went, his phone was still on my counter, going off, over and over.
And the name on it was one I did not know, saved with a little heart next to it.
***Suki ♥***
Who Suki was.
The woman who had just left my flat.
That took me about four minutes to work out and it took the wind out of me more than any of the rest of it, because I had spent those four minutes building a third woman in my head.
She was outside, in a car, on Dray Street, texting a phone that was on my kitchen counter eleven metres above her.
Sukhdeep Rai. Twenty-nine. She is a veterinary nurse at a practice on the other side of Corran and she met Jude Halloran in the November of 2024.
And the first message on that screen said: are you okay? please tell me you're okay.
Asking after him.
What I did with the phone.
I kept it eleven days.
He left it on the counter and by the time I noticed it the door had gone, and I did not run after him, and he did not come back that night.
And the code is my birthday, which is a thing I had found enormously touching in 2023.
And I opened it at about nine o'clock on the second of October and I read until about four in the morning.
Eleven months. Everything. Not just her.
And I want to be straight about those seven hours, because I have told people I looked through his phone, which is what you say.
I read it the way you read a case file. I started in the November of 2024 and went forward in order, and when I did not understand a reference I searched for it, and I kept a note of dates on a piece of paper that is still in my kitchen drawer.
What was in it.
The thing most people would expect, and one thing I did not.
She did not know about me until the May.
He had told her, in the November of 2024, that he lived with a flatmate. For six months.
And in the May of 2025 she found out — a photograph on something, a comment — and there is a run of about forty messages across two days in which she tells him exactly what she thinks of him, and they are not the messages of a woman who knew.
And then she stayed.
She asked him eleven times between the May and the September to tell me. I counted them, on that piece of paper, at about two in the morning.
Eleven times, and each time he said he would, and each time there was a reason it had to be after something — after my work thing in the June, after his mother's operation in the July, after the holiday.
And in the September she stopped asking and started saying she would do it herself.
And the fifth of March.
That is the one.
At eleven minutes past one in the morning on the fifth of March, 2025, I sent Jude Halloran a long message.
It is the most honest thing I have ever written to anybody. It is about how I had been feeling about myself since the February, and about a thing a consultant had said to me in a corridor, and about why I had been wearing the cardigan.
And he replied to it, at about half seven that morning, with something kind, and I remember what it did to me and I remember being glad I had sent it.
And at 08:14 on the fifth of March he screenshotted it and sent it to Suki Rai with four words underneath.
I am not going to write the four words.
I have them. They are on a piece of paper in my drawer because I copied them out at about half two in the morning rather than keep the screenshot, which I could not explain at the time and which I understand now.
She did not reply to it for eleven hours. When she did, she said: that's horrible, Jude.
The woman he was sleeping with told him it was horrible, eleven hours later, and he sent a laughing face.
What I did on the third of October.
I answered her.
As him.
At about eleven in the morning, after about four hours' sleep, I picked up that phone and replied to a message from Suki Rai as though I were Jude Halloran.
And I did it for about thirty-six hours.
Nineteen messages from her. Eleven from me.
And I was good at it. That is the part that has taken the longest. I have been with that man since 2023 and I know how he types and where he puts a full stop and which things he says when he is avoiding something, and it did not occur to her once.
The seven hours, which I have called reading and which were not reading.
Nine o'clock to about four in the morning, at my own kitchen table, with the plate still in the sink.
And the thing I have never told anybody is that I did not start with her.
I started with me.
The first thing I did with that phone, at about nine o'clock on the second of October, was search my own name.
Four hundred and sixty results across eleven months, and I went through them before I went anywhere near Suki Rai, because what I actually wanted to know first was not who she was.
It was what he said about me when I was not there.
Most of it is nothing. Rue's at her sister's. Rue's doing a thing Thursday. Admin.
There are about nine that are not nothing and I read those more than once.
And at about half eleven I realised I had been sitting there for two and a half hours assembling a picture of how a man describes his girlfriend to other people, and that I had not yet looked at a single message from the woman who had been in my kitchen.
I was not investigating an affair. I was looking myself up.
And when I finally did go to the November of 2024 and start on her, it was with a completely different feeling, which is that I had already found what I came for and it was worse than her.
Why I did it.
I have given four answers to this and the first three were not true.
I said I wanted to know whether she had known about me, which I already knew by then, because I had read the May.
I said I wanted evidence. I had seven hours of it on a piece of paper.
I said I was not in my right mind, which is the easiest one and which is nonsense; I made tea in that period and I went to work on the Friday.
The true one is that for thirty-six hours I was the only person in that situation who knew what was happening, and after eleven months of being the only one who did not, I could not give it up.
That is it. It is not revenge and it is not evidence. It is that I had the whole board in front of me for the first time, and putting the phone down meant going back to being a person things happened to.
What she told me.
Things she would not have told me.
That she had been going to come to the flat on the Friday — the third — to tell me herself, with or without him. She had the address. She had been outside once in the September and not come up.
That she had ended it twice, in the June and in the August, and gone back.
And one thing about herself that I am not going to put in here, because she told it to a man she thought she was in love with at about one in the morning, and the fact that it came to me instead does not make it mine.
And at about four o'clock on the Friday afternoon she wrote: are you going to tell her this weekend or am I?
And I wrote back, as him: give me till after the weekend. please.
And she said all right.
That is the message I would take back out of everything in this account, including the thirty-six hours as a whole.
Because that woman was about to come to my door and tell me the truth, which is the one decent thing anybody was offering anybody in the whole of 2025 — and I talked her out of it, using his voice, so that I could keep reading.
And the four hundred and sixty, which I did one more thing with that I have not put in anywhere.
On the fourth of October, before I gave the phone back, I went through them again and I took screenshots.
Not of her. Of me.
Forty-one of them, into my own cloud, by email, from his phone, at about eleven at night on the Saturday.
I have never looked at them again. They are in a folder called Oct and I know exactly where it is and I have not opened it since the fourth of October, 2025.
And in the February I sat down to delete them and did not.
And when Rhona asked me in the April what I thought I was keeping them for, I said evidence, and she let about four seconds go past, and then I said: in case I ever decide I made it up.
That is nearer.
It is not quite it either. The nearest I have got is that those forty-one are the only account that exists of what I was to that man when I was not in the room — and it is a terrible account, and it is detailed, and it is the most complete record anybody has ever made of me.
Nobody will ever write that much about me again.
And I am keeping it because it is mine and because he does not know I have it, and both of those are true and only one of them is a reason.
What happened on the thirteenth.
I gave the phone back.
Through his brother, at a pub car park, in a jiffy bag, which is a thing I had arranged by message.
And he knew by then, obviously, because by the eleventh he had got a replacement and had been through the cloud and had seen eleven messages he had not sent.
And he said one thing to me, by message, on the fourteenth of October, which is the only thing that man has ever said to me that landed.
He said: you pretended to be me to her for two days and you think I'm the liar.
And I have had fourteen months to put together an answer to that and the honest one is: yes.
Yes, because he had done eleven months of it to both of us and I did thirty-six hours of it to one person, and those are not the same and I am not going to let him flatten them.
And also: he is not wrong about the thirty-six hours, and nothing he did makes the thirty-six hours not mine.
What it did to her.
I found out in the January, from her, which I will come to.
On the Monday the sixth, when he got his phone sorted, he rang her, and the first thing he did was tell her she had been talking to me.
And she did not believe him for about two days, because of course she did not — she had the thread and it reads like him.
And then she went back through it and found the places where it is not, and there are two, and she showed me one in the January and she was right and I had not noticed myself doing it.
And what that did to her is the thing nobody has ever asked about, because in the version of this story that goes round, Suki Rai is the other woman and she walked out of my kitchen and that is the end of her.
She had three weeks in which she did not know which of the messages she had sent since the Friday morning had been read by a stranger, and the thing she told at one in the morning was in that window.
She rang her practice manager on the Tuesday and took four days off.
And the two places where it is not him, which she showed me one of in the café.
It is on the Friday afternoon, at about half two, and it is a message of mine that says: i know. i'm sorry. i know what i've put you through.
And she put her finger on what I've put you through and said: "He's never said that. Not once in eleven months."
That is how a woman worked out she had been talking to a stranger. Not a slip about a detail. Not a wrong name.
He had never once, in eleven months, acknowledged that he had done anything to her.
And a woman pretending to be him, in his voice, on a Friday afternoon, could not sustain it for thirty-six hours without doing the decent thing on his behalf.
I apologised to her as him.
I have gone round and round that and I cannot make it a kindness, because it was not one — it was a fluent impersonation that slipped — and it is also, as far as I can establish, the only apology Suki Rai has ever had out of that relationship.
She told me in the café that she had read it about a hundred times in the three days before he told her.
The January.
She asked to meet. Through a mutual, in the December, which took about six weeks to arrange because I kept not answering.
A café on the Corran road, about ninety minutes.
And she did not apologise for the kitchen, and I did not ask her to, and we got that out of the way in about four minutes by both agreeing that we were not doing that part.
What she wanted was to know which messages I had read.
All of them. I told her that straight away, which I think is the only thing I have done well in the whole of this.
And she went through it and asked about four specific ones, and I said yes to all four.
And then she said the thing I have thought about every week since.
She said: "I was going to come on the Friday. I'd got as far as the car."
And I said I knew.
And she said: "I know you know. I'm telling you because I want you to hear that I was going to."
And I said I was sorry.
And she said: "I'm not asking for that either."
What she was asking for.
Nothing, as it turned out.
She wanted ninety minutes in a café with the only other person on earth who had read the whole thing, because there is nobody else she can talk to about it.
She has not told her family. She told one friend and that friend was so appalled about the married-man part that Suki has never mentioned the rest of it.
So for fourteen months the only other human being who knows what is in those eleven months is me, and I am the woman whose kitchen she was standing in.
We are not friends. We have met twice.
But she messages me about twice a month, usually about something stupid, and I answer, and neither of us has ever said what that is.
And the forty minutes, which is the whole reason any of it happened and which I have never explained.
I came home forty minutes early on the second of October because a meeting at four was cancelled.
That is all it was. There is no instinct in it and I did not suspect anything that afternoon and I want to say that clearly, because about nine people have told me since that I must have known.
I did not. On the second of October, 2025, at about twenty past five, I was a woman going home early with a free evening, and I was pleased about it, and I had texted him to say so.
At 17:04. Meeting binned, home early xx
That message is in the thread. I saw it on his phone at about one in the morning, in among the four hundred and sixty.
He read it at 17:06.
He had fourteen minutes.
He was in my kitchen at twenty past five with a woman because he had read that message and done nothing with it, and I have thought about that more than I have thought about the kissing.
Not panic. Not a scramble. Fourteen minutes, and he carried on.
And the thing that is actually in me about that, which took until the August to name, is that it was not even contempt. He just did not believe anything was going to happen to him.
Jude.
He is with somebody else and I know that because Corran is a small place.
And I have said about forty times that I do not think about him, which is true in the way those things are true.
What I do think about is the fifth of March at eight fourteen in the morning.
Not the kissing. The forwarding.
Because the kissing is a thing a man does with his body, and I can get my head round a man doing something with his body.
At fourteen minutes past eight on the fifth of March, 2025, a man read a message his girlfriend had written to him at one in the morning about how she felt about herself — and then he took a photograph of the screen, and he chose four words, and he sent it.
That is not weakness and it is not a lapse. It is composition. It took him a minute or two.
And then he sent me something kind at half seven, which means he did the kind one first.
And the eleven days, which I have given one line to and which were the oddest eleven days of my life.
I went to work on the Friday and on the Monday and on the Tuesday.
I sat in a meeting on the seventh of October with four people and said something they laughed at, with that phone in my bag, having been Jude Halloran by text for thirty-six hours over the weekend.
And on the eighth my sister came round and I made us dinner and did not tell her any of it, and she left at about ten, and I got the phone out again at twenty past.
I was not reading by then. There was nothing left to read.
I was looking at the thread I had written. Eleven messages, in his voice, going out to a woman in Corran who thought she was talking to a man she was in love with.
And I read my own eleven about forty times over those days, checking them, the way you check a piece of work.
That is the thing that frightened me more than anything else in this, and it is the only part I took straight to Rhona in the November rather than working up to.
Not that I had done it. That afterwards, for a week, I kept going back to see whether I had done it well.
And the last thing.
The cardigan is still in the wardrobe.
It is grey and it is from 2021 and I wore it most days between the February and the October of 2025, which is a fact I did not notice until the March of this year when I was looking at photographs for something else.
Eight months. It is in about forty pictures.
And in that kitchen, on the second of October, with two people in front of me, my hands went to pull it closed and I made them stop, and I have been very proud of that for fourteen months and I have told it to about nine people.
And in the June I worked out what I had actually done.
I made my hands stop because Suki Rai was watching.
Not for me. I did not think I will not hide from this man. I thought — and I can remember the exact texture of it — she will see me do it.
I have been telling that moment as the one where I stopped being ashamed of my own body in front of somebody who had made me ashamed of it.
It is the moment I decided not to let another woman see me flinch.
Which is the same instinct that made me read a phone for seven hours, and type as him for thirty-six, and talk a twenty-nine-year-old out of knocking on my own door.
May you like
Not wanting to be the one who did not know. Not wanting to be the one who was seen.
I still wear it. Not often. And when I do, I have caught myself twice checking whether I am wearing it because it is cold.
