I FOUND A TRAIN TICKET TO A CITY I DIDN’T KNOW HE HAD ANY REASON TO VISIT
The crumpled ticket fell out of his jacket pocket while I was hanging it up, landing with a soft flutter on the hardwood floor. My eyes immediately fixated on the destination city printed clearly on the small white rectangle.
It wasn’t a place he’d ever mentioned needing to go for work, or even casually wanting to visit. A strange, cold feeling started spreading up my arms as I picked it up, the thin paper feeling brittle under my fingertips. I checked the date; it was from last week.
When he walked in, I just held it out, my voice barely a whisper, “What is this?” He froze, the easy smile sliding right off his face. His eyes darted nervously around the room, avoiding mine, and my stomach churned with a sudden, awful certainty.
He stammered something about a colleague, a “quick trip,” but the lie felt heavy in the air like stale smoke. He reached for the ticket, but I pulled it back, my hand trembling as I saw a name written faintly on the back in small script. It wasn’t his colleague’s.
Then I saw the tiny lipstick smudge just below the name.
👇 *Full story continued in the comments…*My hand flew to my mouth, stifling a gasp. The name. The smudge. The pieces clicked into place with a sickening thud that echoed the frantic beating in my chest. It wasn’t a colleague. It wasn’t a quick trip for work. My grip tightened on the fragile paper, the edges digging into my palm.
“Who is this?” I managed to choke out, the whisper now a low growl. Tears welled up, blurring his panicked face, which was now devoid of all color. The truth was written all over him – in the sweat beading on his forehead, in the way he hunched his shoulders as if bracing for a blow, in the complete absence of any plausible explanation.
He stammered again, something about a friend, a favor, but the words were nonsensical, desperate flailing. He looked like a cornered animal, and the sight of his pathetic attempt to weave another lie twisted the knife deeper. I didn’t need him to confess; the ticket, the name, the lipstick, and his reaction were confession enough.
“Get out,” I said, my voice shaking but firm. “Get out now.”
His head snapped up, his eyes finally meeting mine, filled with a mixture of fear and something that might have been regret, but it was too late. The image of him on that train, heading to a secret city with a name scrawled on the ticket and a stranger’s lipstick smudge below it, had seared itself into my mind. The man I thought I knew, the life we had built, felt like a cruel illusion.
He tried to take a step towards me, to plead, to explain, but I held up my hand, the crumpled ticket still clutched tight. “Don’t,” I whispered, the tears finally spilling over, hot and heavy. “Just go.” He stood frozen for a moment, the silence amplifying the sound of my own ragged breathing and the frantic hammering of my heart. Then, with a defeated slump of his shoulders, he turned and walked towards the door. The sound of it clicking shut echoed through the apartment, leaving me standing alone in the sudden silence, the flimsy piece of paper a devastating testament to a journey I never knew he took, and a future I now knew we wouldn’t share. I let the ticket fall to the floor, watching it land where it had first revealed its secret, feeling the cold emptiness spread from my hands to fill the entire room.