New Mom Confronts Cheating Husband

“What the hell is this, Kai?”

I held his phone out in front of him, my thumb trembling on the screen. The search history was still open.

Trans escorts near me. Massage parlours with extras.

He didn’t even flinch. Just kept loading the dishwasher, stacking plates with a calm, methodical rhythm that made my blood boil.

“My mate used my phone,” he said, his voice flat. “His girlfriend’s suspicious. I was helping him out.”

“Helping him out?” My laugh was sharp, brittle. “By installing Grindr? By having sixty blocked numbers that are all, according to the call logs, from different escort services? Your mate’s got a hell of a variety, doesn’t he?”

Kai finally turned, his face a mask of weary patience. “I told you, Ella. When I’m on coke, I get… curious. I look at things. It doesn’t mean I do anything. It doesn’t mean I’m attracted to men.”

The air in our kitchen, usually warm with the smell of coffee and our daughter’s formula, felt cold and thin.

The perfect little life I’d painted in my head—the one with the matching throws and the family photos on the wall, the one where he was my everything—was cracking right in front of me.

“Curious,” I echoed. The word tasted like ash. “Two weeks after I gave birth to your child. While I was bleeding, exhausted, thinking we were in this together. That was your curiosity?”

He shrugged, a gesture so casual it felt like a slap. “It’s just browsing. It’s nothing real.”

“Nothing real?” My voice climbed, shaky. “What’s real, Kai? This?” I gestured to the living room, where our baby, Lily, slept in her rocker. “Or the secret world on your phone?”

He walked towards me, but not to comfort me. To take his phone. I clutched it tighter.

“Give it back, Ella. You’re being paranoid. Postpartum depression makes you see things that aren’t there.”

Postpartum depression. He’d learned the term from the pamphlets the hospital gave us. Now he wielded it like a weapon, a reason to dismiss every tear, every doubt, every screaming instinct in my gut.

“I see the evidence!” I spat. “I see the searches, the app, the blocked calls. I don’t see a mate. I see you.”

For a second, his mask slipped. A flicker of something—annoyance, maybe guilt—crossed his eyes before they cooled again. “Fine. You see me. What are you going to do about it? We have a baby. A life. You can’t just throw that away over some stupid internet history.”

The weight of his words pressed down on me. A baby. A life. The responsibility sat on my chest, heavy and suffocating. I wanted to scream, to throw the phone at him, to run. But Lily’s soft snore from the other room pinned me here.

“You’re going away again next week,” I said, the dread a physical lump in my throat. “For work. How can I trust you? How can I lie here alone at night, feeding our daughter,