Chapter 6 - THE PARTY PHOTOGRAPHS
Megan went through everything.
Bank records.
Old devices.
Cloud storage.
Business calendars.
She found photographs almost immediately.
Andrew holding Noah at age three.
Andrew at his fifth birthday.
Andrew in the front row of a school performance.
Andrew standing beside Rachel at a lakeside cabin.
Every image proved the same thing.
This had not been an affair maintained at the edges of Andrew’s life.
It had been another family.
The greatest shock came from one birthday photograph.
Andrew was smiling at the camera while Noah blew out candles.
On the wall behind them was a calendar.
The date matched the weekend Andrew had supposedly been in Chicago with Megan’s father negotiating a property deal.
He had left that meeting early.
Megan remembered asking why.
Andrew had said he had food poisoning.
She laughed when she saw the photograph.
Then she cried.
Eight years was too long to revisit one memory at a time.
Every holiday became suspect.
Every “delayed flight.”
Every closed office door.
Every sudden work trip.
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She began to understand that betrayal changed the past before it destroyed the future.
Nothing stayed where it had been.
