I used to joke that my husband had a sixth sense for me. Haris would call the minute I turned onto our street: “You on your way?” It happened so often it stopped feeling sweet and started feeling… precise. Too precise.
I asked him once how he always knew. He laughed it off—“Coincidence, Naima”—and then somehow got better at it. Even when I took the long way home. Even when I stopped somewhere I hadn’t planned, like the boutique I ducked into after work one Tuesday. I’d told no one. As I turned into our block, my phone rang.
“Did you get anything cute?”
“From where?” I asked, my throat tight.
“The boutique,” he said, casual as a shrug. “You love those places.”
I laughed like it was adorable. Inside, my palms were sweating.
I went full true-crime. Checked my phone’s settings. Searched the car for AirTags. Had my techie brother sweep my bag and glove compartment for trackers. Nothing. So I changed the only variable left: me.
One Saturday I told Haris I’d be at the farmer’s market with Hema like always. Instead I drove clear across town to a used bookstore café and sat in a sunstripe sipping tea, thumbing through battered cookbooks for three hours. When I got home, he looked up from the couch. “Market closed today?”
“Why?” I asked carefully.
“Saw on their page they were setting up late. Figured you’d be annoyed.”
Every word felt like a step on thin ice.
Two weeks later, I was hauling warm laundry from the dryer when something small clinked onto the tile. A tiny square tile with a faint G logo—no Apple stamp, no USB port. I googled it on the laundry room floor, heart in my throat. GPS tracking tile. Cheap, discreet. Easy to tuck into a pocket seam.
My chest went cold. I slipped it into a Ziploc and hid it under the sink. That night I kissed him hello like nothing was different and lay awake listening to the clock.
Why track me? Did he think I was cheating? Or was he the one hiding something and needed me accounted for?
The next week I watched him the way he’d been watching me. Late-night “work calls” in the garage. A bank statement from an account I didn’t recognize. When I borrowed his laptop, I saw a second user I couldn’t open. Gia—wise, blunt Gia—said, “What if it’s not about you at all?”
The tracker had an app. It had to. One afternoon while Haris was in the shower, I opened his phone. I knew his code; he’d never been precious about it. No suspicious icons, but under Battery Usage was the same G logo, quietly humming along. I tapped it.
My routes lit up on his screen. Timestamps, stops, a breadcrumb trail of my last two weeks. I took screenshots, my fingers shaking. I didn’t confront him. Not yet. I needed to know the shape of what I was standing in.
So I followed him.
He said he had a late work dinner. I waited ten minutes, then slipped into my car and tailed him—slow, two turns back. He didn’t go downtown. He drove to a quiet neighborhood I didn’t recognize, parked, and walked straight into a single-story house with kid bikes in the yard.
I sat there twenty minutes with my heart trying to climb out of my ribs. Then I drove home, hands clenched so tight my knuckles hurt.
In the morning I went back while he was at work. The house looked ordinary—trim lawn, wind chimes. I scribbled the address and went home to search. It took one Facebook entry: Raquel. Mid-thirties, a single mom of two. Photos of that porch. In one, blurred in the background, was Haris—steadying a little bike. Comments told the rest.
“So happy for you and H!”
“Girl, he’s a keeper.”
“Looks like a real dad already!”
I stared until the screen lost meaning.
That night I dropped the Ziploc on the table, then set my phone beside it and fanned through the screenshots. I showed him the address, the picture of him in someone else’s background.
He didn’t deny it. He just sat down hard and said, “I was going to tell you.”
Tell me what—that you put a tracker on your wife to manage your lies? That you’d been splitting yourself into two men—mine and hers?
He met Raquel almost three years ago. Told her he was separated, then divorced. Told me he had late dinners and big projects. He said he loved us both. That he never meant for it to get this far.
I told him to leave.
There were tears, letters, apologies that curled into excuses. I ignored them. Raquel found out a week later and messaged me—devastated, mortified, sorry. I believed her. We spoke on the phone, two women at opposite ends of one ugly story. She ended it too.
A month after the blast radius quieted, I sat in a crowded coffee shop with my laptop open and nothing useful coming out of my fingers. A woman in her sixties asked to share my table. Her name was Farah. She had that kind of listening that unties your tongue. I told her everything. She squeezed my hand and said, “Sometimes life burns down what you thought was permanent just to make space for what’s true.”
We swapped numbers. She ran a local nonprofit that helps women navigate divorce and rebuild. A few weeks later I was there sorting files, then running social, then mentoring. It gave my days a spine. I met women whose laughter sounded like brass and wind chimes. I slept through the night. I planted basil on the windowsill and danced in my kitchen while onions sizzled.
Almost a year later I bumped cans into a stranger at the grocery store. We knelt to pick them up, both apologizing at once. His name was Sagan. Widower. Kind eyes, quiet humor. He asked if I wanted to grab coffee. I said yes.
It’s been eight months. It’s simple, honest, a soft place that doesn’t need performing.
Looking back, I don’t think Haris set out to break our life. I think he let every small decision tilt toward himself until we were living inside his lie. Love is not enough when truth is missing. If you feel that small tug in your gut, that off-note you keep humming past—listen. Follow it, even if it leads through fire.
On the other side there is room for more. More truth. More peace. More you.
If this hit close to home, share it with someone who needs the reminder. 💛