Not because I actually think I’ll find something. That’s the part I keep circling back to at 1am, phone in hand, thumb hovering over an app I have no real reason to open. I’ve done this for months now and found nothing — not once, not a single message that gave me any reason to feel the way I feel. And still I open it. Still I read.

It didn’t used to be like this. There was a version of us, maybe two years ago, where trusting him was just the water I swam in, not something I had to actively perform every night after he fell asleep. I don’t know exactly when it curdled into this — this quiet, methodical checking, this private audit I run while he breathes evenly beside me, completely unaware that I’m three feet away conducting surveillance on a marriage he doesn’t know is under investigation.

I’ve tried to trace it back to one moment. A missed call from a number I didn’t recognize. A late night that ran later than usual with no explanation I fully believed. None of it, on its own, was ever enough to justify what this has become. But something shifted, some quiet certainty I used to carry just eroded a little at a time, and now I can’t sleep without checking, and I can’t stop checking even though checking has never once given me anything except the temporary relief of finding nothing.

The worst part isn’t the checking itself. It’s that I’ve started to resent him for a betrayal that, as far as I can actually prove, never happened. I catch myself being colder some mornings, distracted, distant, and he has no idea why, because he has no idea any of this is happening at all. I don’t know how to stop. I don’t even know anymore if this is about him, or if somewhere along the way it became about something in me that started distrusting long before he gave me any real reason to.