Bimql chhetry.

For weeks, something felt off. He guarded his phone like it was classified information. Late walks. Random excuses. Different cologne. I finally snapped and checked his phone while he slept. No messages. No dating apps. Just a notes app. There was a list. Dozens of entries. All dated. Each one was about me. Things I’d said in passing. Stuff I didn’t even remember mentioning. Little details about my habits, things I like, things that make me upset. At the bottom of the note it said: “Don’t forget. She matters.” When I confronted him, he shrugged and said he writes things down so he doesn’t mess up. I don’t know if that’s thoughtful or mildly terrifying. Either way, I’m sleeping a little lighter now.

This came up because he kept saying his bank balance never made sense to him. Not in a dramatic way, just this low-level confusion where he felt like money kept disappearing faster than it should. He wasn’t panicking about it, more annoyed and convinced something was off. One night we were hanging out and he mentioned it again, so I asked if we could actually look at his transactions. He shrugged and said sure, because he genuinely didn’t think we’d find anything. We scrolled for a bit and almost immediately saw a streaming service he hadn’t opened in months. Then a music app he said he “basically stopped using.” Then a random productivity app he downloaded during a short phase where he thought he’d suddenly become very organized. Each one was around $8–$15 a month, nothing huge on its own. When I added them up, it came out to just under $100 a month. And that was only what we noticed right away. He stared at the screen for a second and then said, completely serious, “Wait… they still...

I don't know why I’m writing this. I guess some part of me thinks that if I type it all out, make it digital and real in a way that isn't just a buzzing in my skull, maybe I can understand it. Or maybe it’s just a confession. A warning. I don’t know. The house is quiet now for the first time in my life. The only sound is the hum of the old refrigerator and the groan of the pipes when the heat kicks on. For twenty-eight years, there was always another sound. The wheezing rasp of my mother’s breathing, the constant, wet cough that punctuated every conversation, and the low hiss of her oxygen tank. That sound was the soundtrack to my life. It’s gone now. She’s gone. And the silence is so much louder than the noise ever was. I live in the house I grew up in. A two-story box with peeling paint on a street of other peeling boxes. This whole town is peeling. It’s a Rust Belt ghost, a place that industry built and then abandoned, leaving behind skeletons of factories and people with n...

Throwaway for obvious reasons. The first thing everyone remembers is that I “ruined” Thanksgiving. That morning, I told my wife I didn’t want my brother in our house anymore. I didn’t yell. I didn’t explain. I just said that if he came, I would leave. She stared at me like I’d insulted her family dog. Within an hour my phone was blowing up—my mom telling me I was being cruel, my dad asking what was wrong with me, my brother sending a text that just said, “Relax.” No one asked why. They’d already decided I was the problem. What made it worse was that three weeks earlier, I’d still trusted my wife completely. She’d started acting… careful. Not distant, not cold—careful. Her phone never left her hand, but she wasn’t scrolling. She angled it away from me like it was muscle memory. She’d say she was running errands and come back freshly showered. When I asked if something was wrong, she wrapped her arms around me and said I was her safe place. I wanted that to be true. One night I grabbed ...

I am sitting here watching my 7-year-old daughter Lily run across the yard, and I still can’t believe her own grandparents almost took that away from her. A year ago, Lily had a tumor pressing against her spinal cord. We had four weeks to save her from irreversible damage. I begged my parents for a loan, offering my house as collateral. They are wealthy—Chanel, Rolexes, the whole thing. My father looked me in the eye while eating an expensive steak and said: "We gave the $180,000 to your sister Jessica for her boutique. She deserves a better life." Jessica even told me to stop being "hysterical" because Lily wasn't dying yet. What they didn't know was that my fiancé, David, was a senior partner managing an $800 million portfolio. He had the money all along, but he wanted to see who my family really was before we got married. He paid for everything, and Lily is healthy today. Now, the boutique has failed. Jessica spent the money on luxury cars instead of clo...

It all started when I moved into my new home in late October. It had barely been a week when I saw him for the first time. I was washing dishes when headlights flashed across my front window and stopped. I looked out and saw an older sedan parked directly across the street with the engine still running. Behind the wheel was a man who just sat there staring. I thought it was weird, but I just tried to ignore it. So I went back to washing my dishes. When I finished about twenty minutes later, I checked again and the same man was still sitting there. It was creeping me out, but I had literally just moved into this home and I didn't want to overreact and freak out if it was nothing, so I just closed my curtain and went about my business. A couple hours later, right before I went to bed, I checked again. The car was finally gone. But then the very next night, it happened again. And again the night after that. Every night the same man in the same car would park there and would just ...