[Muhammad Hasan]

Chapter - 16

The suspicion did not arrive as a sudden revelation. It had been building since the first evening call, layer by layer, until it sat in my chest like something solid.
I replayed the sounds in my head while I lay awake that night. The high, broken breathing. The rhythmic creak that never quite matched “moving boxes.” The later call with its unmistakable wet slap of skin and the way her voice kept fracturing around the word “yoga.” I had accepted her clever answers in the moment because the alternative was too large to face over a phone line a hundred miles away. But alone in the dark house the answers no longer held.
By morning the doubt had hardened into something sharper.
I waited until nine before I called. She answered on the fourth ring, voice still thick with sleep—or with something else.
“Hey,” she said. Soft. Careful.
“I need you to come home,” I told her. No preamble. “As soon as you can. Today if possible. Tomorrow at the latest.”
A short silence. Then the faint rustle of sheets.
“Baby… I was just talking to Mom about staying one more night. Maybe two. She’s really enjoying having me here and I’m still feeling restless. A little more time would help.”
“I don’t think more time is what you need right now.”
Another pause, longer this time. In the background I heard a low male murmur, too quiet to make out words, and then the unmistakable wet sound of a kiss being interrupted.
Sarah’s voice came back sharp and flustered. “Stop— I’m on the phone.”
My stomach dropped.
“Who are you talking to?”
She did not answer. The kissing sound returned for half a second—soft, lingering—before she pulled away again with a breathy, frustrated “Not now.”
“Sarah. Who is there with you?”
“I… I’ll call you later, okay? Mom’s calling me downstairs. We’ll talk about coming home later today. I promise.”
“Sarah—”
The line went dead.
I sat on the edge of the bed with the phone still pressed to my ear long after the dial tone started. The house felt larger and emptier than it had the day before. Every sound—the refrigerator cycling on, a car passing outside—seemed too loud.
I tried calling back. It went straight to voicemail.
I texted.
Me: Answer the phone.
Me: Who was with you just now?
Me: Sarah. Call me.
No reply.
I spent the next hour walking the rooms of the house like a man checking locks after a break-in. The guest-room door still didn’t close properly. The kitchen counter still held the faint memory of the soft morning I had walked in on. Everything felt like evidence of a story I was no longer being told.
By noon I had left three more voicemails. By two I had driven past the route she would take if she were coming home early, just in case. The highway stayed empty of her car.
At 3:17 my phone finally lit up with her name.
I answered before the second ring.
“Sarah.”
Her voice was quieter than before, almost subdued. “I’m sorry about earlier. I was… distracted. Mom had a friend over and things got noisy. I shouldn’t have hung up like that.”
“You said ‘stop, I’m on the phone.’ You said it to someone in the room with you. Not to your mother.”
A soft exhale. “It was nothing. Just… someone being playful while I was trying to talk. It’s not important.”
“It sounded important.”
“I don’t want to fight over the phone. Can we talk when I’m home?”
“When are you coming home?”
Another pause. In the background I thought I heard the low rumble of a man’s voice again, quickly muffled.
“I still want those extra nights,” she said carefully. “Just one or two. I need the space. Things have been heavy between us and this break is helping. I’ll be back Sunday at the latest. Maybe Saturday if I can wrap things up here.”
“Sarah. Look me in the eye—over the phone—and tell me Jake is not there.”
The silence that followed was long enough that I counted three full breaths.
“I’ll call you tonight,” she said finally. “I promise. We’ll talk properly. I have to go.”
She hung up before I could answer.
I stood in the middle of the living room with the phone still warm in my hand and felt the last of the careful structure we had tried to build collapse quietly around me. The rules were already dead. The ending I had declared was already being rewritten a hundred miles away in a house that was supposed to belong to her mother.
I did not know yet what I would do when she finally came home.
I only knew that the next call, whenever it came, would no longer be met with the same willingness to accept clever answers.
The suspicion had finished arriving.
Now it was simply waiting for the truth to catch up.