The Treachery I Never Asked to Uncover

 

I never asked to be the villain in my dad’s story. I wasn’t the one sneaking around, lying, betraying vows—but somehow, I was the one who ruined everything.

It started with a mistake. Not mine, of course. Apple linked his phone number to my laptop, and suddenly, I had a front-row seat to a betrayal I was never supposed to see. The texts, the photos—it was all there, glaring at me from my screen, proof of the affair he thought he’d kept hidden. And she wasn’t just some stranger; she was barely older than me.

I could have closed the laptop and pretended I never saw it. Could have carried on like nothing was wrong, like my world hadn’t shifted under me. But how could I? How could I sit across the dinner table from my mother, watch her smile at him, and know that it was all a lie?

So I told her. And for that, my father decided that I was the problem. Not his cheating. Not his deception. No, it was me—the person who exposed it, the person who refused to sit back and let him get away with it.

He still blames me for the divorce. Still acts like I held a grenade in my hands and blew up our family, when really, all I did was uncover the wreckage he had already made. And the worst part? Some part of me still wishes I could fix it, make it make sense, take back something that was never my fault in the first place. But I can’t. So now I carry this weight, this anger, this unfair guilt that was never mine to bear.