I stood on shaking legs and turned on the faucet, letting the water run cold before cupping my hands beneath it. The water was so cold it hurt, and I splashed it on my face once, twice, three times, trying to shock myself back into something that felt real.
When I looked up, the mirror showed me a stranger.
Same dark hair pulled back in the same ponytail I'd worn since this morning. Same eyes, same face, same small scar above my left eyebrow from when I was eight and tried to wrangle a spooked calf at my dad's clinic. He'd patched me up himself, steady hands and gentle voice, telling me that sometimesanimals sense fear and sometimes they just sense change, and either way, you had to stay calm.
But the woman staring back at me wasn't the same person who'd walked into this clinic twelve hours ago.
That woman had a husband she trusted. A friend she believed in. A future she could see.
This woman had a laptop in the next room with footage that proved none of it had been real.
Stay calm, my dad had said. But he'd been talking about spooked calves, not ruined marriages. And I wasn't calm. I was something else entirely. Something that was cold and sharp and perfectly, terrifyingly clear.
I dried my hands on the rough paper towels and walked back to the office.
The laptop was still open, the video paused on the moment before the kiss. I sat down, pulled the chair close, and pressed play.
They kissed for eleven seconds.
I know because I watched the timestamp in the corner. 23:34:18. 23:34:29.
Then Matt's hand moved to her waist. Then… lower. Angela arched into him, and he lifted her onto the exam table, the exact same table where I'd sutured a dog's leg that afternoon, where I'd vaccinated a kitten that morning, where I spent half my working life trying to save things.
His hands went to the hem of her shirt, and that’s when I stopped counting seconds.
They moved like people who knew each other. Theirs wasn’t the frantic fumbling of a first mistake, but the practiced ease ofsomething that had happened before. The way his fingers found the clasp of her bra without hesitation, the way she tilted her head back to give him access to her throat… The way he braced one hand on the table and pressed closer, and she wrapped her legs around him like she'd done it a dozen times.
Maybe she had.
The footage was grainy, black and white, but I didn’t need color to understand.
His hips moved against hers.
Her hands fisted in his hair.
His mouth on her neck, her collarbone, lower.
The table—mygoddamnexam table—rocked under their weight.
Three minutes and forty-seven seconds, and I watched all of it.
When it was over, they stayed pressed together for a moment, foreheads touching, his hand still cupped against her face. Then Angela said something I couldn't hear, and Matt laughed. A soundless exhale caught on camera, but I knew that laugh. I'd heard it a thousand times.
He kissed her again, his movements softer this time. Almost… tender.
Then they straightened their clothes, and Angela glanced at the door like she was checking to make sure no one had seen, and Matt ran a hand through his hair the way he always did when he was satisfied, and they left the frame together.
The video kept running for another thirty seconds, showing the empty prep room. I sat there and just stared at the slightly askew exam table, the ghost of what I'd just witnessed.
Then the motion sensor timed out, and the screen went black.
I clicked on another timestamp. Two nights before the one I'd just watched. 11:17 PM.
The prep room again. Angela entered first, already talking to someone just outside the frame. Then a figure in uniform stepped partially into view. It wasn’t much, but enough to see the shoulder patch, the dark fabric, the familiar build.
They stayed mostly out of frame after that, drifting toward the counter along the left wall, right where the camera didn’t bother to focus. I could only see pieces of them: the shadow of his shoulder blocking the light, Angela’s hand bracing against the metal backsplash, the edge of a cabinet rattling with their movement. The exam table stayed perfectly still in the center of the shot, exactly where it always was. And yet… there was no mistaking what they were doing just outside the camera’s mercy.
It lasted four minutes.
