Page 31 of The Humiliated Wife

Now she realized he hadn’t liked her texts at all. He’d thought they were beneath him. He’d thoughtshewas beneath him.

Fiona slipped the phone into her desk drawer and locked it.

She had twenty minutes left of lunch break. She could eat her sandwich in peace, grade a few papers, maybe even think her own thoughts without wondering if they'd end up as captions online.

Fiona stoodat the front of her classroom, marker in hand, staring at the whiteboard where she'd written "Creative Writing: Personal Narratives."

Her students were bent over their notebooks, pencils scratching across paper, completely absorbed in their assignment.

But the only personal narrative she could think about was @shitfionasays.

She couldn’t keep avoiding it. The pictures. The comments. The full scope of what Dean had done to her. Every time she thought about looking, her stomach clenched and she found something else to focus on. Lesson plans. Grading. Anything.

But standing here, watching her students pour their honest thoughts onto paper without fear of judgment, she felt something shift in her chest.

What if it wasn't as bad as she'd imagined? What if she was overreacting, just like Dean had said? What if she'd built this up in her mind into something worse than it actually was?

The hope felt dangerous and foolish, but it was there. Whispering that maybe—maybe—she was being dramatic. That maybe the posts were actually fond, the comments mostly harmless. That maybe her hurt had colored everything, made her see malice where there was just... playfulness between friends.

She felt foolish all over again. Foolish for potentially overreacting. Foolish for running away without getting the full picture. Foolish for standing here in front of her class, too scared to even look at what he’d written about her.

But beneath the foolishness was something else: a terrible, desperate hope that maybe her marriage wasn't as broken as it felt. That maybe the man she loved hadn't actually betrayed her as completely as she feared.

She had to know.

"Miss Fiona?" Marcus looked up from his notebook. "How long should our stories be?"

"However long they need to be to tell the truth," she said automatically, her teacher voice steady even as her heart hammered.

After school, she decided. She didn’t have to look now. When she was by herself, then she'd look.

She had to know.

Fiona satin her car in the grocery store parking lot, engine off, keys still dangling from the ignition. She’d needed somewhere anonymous, somewhere between school and Emma’s house, somewhere no one would recognize her if this went badly.

She stared down at her phone.

That terrible, foolish hope was still there—whispering that maybe she'd been wrong, maybe it wasn't as bad as she'd imagined. Maybe Dean was right that she was overreacting.

She had to know. All of it."

She typed @shitfionasays into the search bar.

The account appeared immediately. Dean's careful aesthetic—clean, minimal, each post formatted like a little magazine excerpt. Professional. Polished. Profitable.

22.3k followers.

Fiona's breath caught. Twenty thousand people. Following her humiliation. Consuming her private moments like entertainment.

She scrolled to the first post. Posted years ago.

Sweet girl, wrong planet. #naive #adorable

The first few posts looked almost… sweet.

Not kind, exactly. But fond? She could almost believe it, if she squinted. If she wanted to.

But the more she read, the more the contempt bled through the posts. She felt shame curl inside her chest like smoke. Her face felt itchy with a blush that had nowhere to hide.