Relationship Drama

He Texted Her From a Different Number — and Called Her "Baby" by Mistake

It was 11:47 PM. The message wasn't even meant for her. That's what made it impossible to ignore.

Riya wasn't checking his phone. She wants that on record, even now. It was sitting face-up on the kitchen counter while Arjun was in the shower, and the screen lit up on its own — a text from a number she didn't recognize.

"Can't stop thinking about last night, baby. Same time Thursday?"

For a moment she assumed it was spam, the kind of message that gets sent to wrong numbers all the time. Then she saw the contact photo load in. It wasn't a stranger. It was a woman named Priya, saved in his phone — under a name that wasn't even disguised. Just "Priya 💛."

She'd read about this exact gut-drop feeling once, in a story about a woman who found her husband's secret apartment — the way your body knows before your mind catches up, how your hands go cold before you've even finished reading the sentence.

---

Arjun came out of the bathroom fifteen minutes later, towel around his neck, completely unaware his phone had betrayed him. Riya hadn't moved from the counter. She hadn't touched anything. She just watched him reach for it, glance at the screen, and go very, very still.

"He didn't even try to explain. He just said, 'You weren't supposed to see that,' like the problem was the seeing — not the doing."

That sentence is the one she keeps coming back to, months later. Not the affair itself — somehow that almost made sense once she found out it had been going on for four months, ever since his "work trip" to Pune. What she couldn't get past was the casualness of it. The way "Thursday" had become a routine. The way she'd made him dinner on at least three of those Thursdays.

She asked him one thing before she left the apartment that night: why Priya, why now, why her. He didn't have an answer that wasn't an excuse. So she stopped asking and started packing instead.

It's been five months. Riya still has that message saved — not out of bitterness, she says, but as a reminder of the exact second her life split into "before" and "after." What she didn't expect was the text that came three weeks ago, from yet another unknown number. Three words: "He's doing it again." She still hasn't decided whether to respond.

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Would you respond to that text? What would you even say?