I FOUND A SECOND PHONE HIDDEN INSIDE MARK’S GARAGE LOCKER
My hands were shaking so hard I dropped the small silver key onto the dusty concrete floor. I bent down, the stale smell of oil and exhaust stinging my nose, fumbling to pick it up while my heart hammered against my ribs. He said it was just old tools, locked up for safety, but the gut feeling had been screaming at me for weeks.
I finally got the small padlock open on the metal cabinet near the back wall. It wasn’t full of wrenches; it was mostly empty except for a few cardboard boxes and this cheap-looking phone stuffed in a back corner. It was dead, of course, but I found the charger coiled neatly beside it.
Plugging it in felt like a point of no return. What if it was nothing? What if I was just being paranoid? Then the screen flickered on, the bright light harsh in the dim garage. “You shouldn’t be in here, Sarah,” he said softly from the doorway, but I barely heard him.
I scrolled through the recent messages, my fingers slick with sweat, the cold glass screen feeling unreal under my touch. It was hundreds of them, all to the same number. And then I saw the name saved for the contact.
Then I saw the name saved for the contact: ‘Not Sarah.’
👇 *Full story continued in the comments…*My heart stopped. ‘Not Sarah.’ The name seared itself into my brain, a stark, brutal accusation I didn’t understand. Hundreds of messages. My fingers trembled, hovering over the screen. Who was ‘Not Sarah’?
“Sarah.” Mark’s voice was still soft, but it was closer now, just behind me. I flinched, dropping the phone onto the floor again. It clattered, the screen going dark.
“Mark, what is this?” My voice was shaking, barely a whisper. I didn’t look at him, just stared at the dark rectangle on the concrete, embodying everything I suddenly didn’t know about him.
He stepped past me, his shadow falling over the phone. He didn’t pick it up. He knelt beside it, his gaze fixed on it, then slowly looked up at me. His face was pale, etched with something I couldn’t decipher – guilt? Fear? Resignation?
“I… I wasn’t going to keep it from you forever,” he said, his voice low and rough. “Just… I didn’t know how.”
“How? How to tell me about your secret phone and ‘Not Sarah’?” The tremor in my voice escalated into a cold fury. “Who is she, Mark?”
He closed his eyes for a moment, a visible wince crossing his face. “It’s not… It’s not another woman, Sarah. Not like that.”
I let out a harsh laugh, completely unconvinced. “Not like that? Hundreds of messages to a contact named ‘Not Sarah’? What other way is there?”
He sighed, a heavy, weary sound. “She’s… It’s not a person, Sarah. Not a specific person. It’s a group. A support group. The phone… it’s for them. It’s anonymous.”
I stared at him, dumbfounded. “A support group? For what?”
He finally picked up the phone, turning it over in his hands. He didn’t unlock it. “Things… things I couldn’t talk to you about. Couldn’t talk to anyone about, really. Not face-to-face.” He paused, swallowing hard. “Anxiety. Stuff from before… before us. Things that have been getting worse. I found this online group, just for talking, for people dealing with… with similar things. They use pseudonyms. ‘Not Sarah’ was just… I just put something in so it wouldn’t be a number. Something that reminded me… reminded me who I was talking to, who I wasn’t talking to.”
The anger was still there, hot and sharp, but it was mingling with confusion, and something else… a cold, creeping sadness. He was talking about struggles, about anxiety, about things from his past. And he’d kept it all a complete secret. He’d built a wall, locked it away in his garage, and talked to strangers under a coded name instead of talking to me.
“You… you couldn’t tell *me*?” I choked out, the words raw. “You had to hide a phone and talk to people you don’t even know instead of the woman you live with?”
His gaze didn’t waver, but the pain in his eyes deepened. “I tried, Sarah. God, I tried. But the words just… wouldn’t come out. I was scared. Scared you’d think I was weak. Scared you’d leave. It got easier talking to them, just typing it out, without having to see your face or hear my own voice crack.”
He held the phone out to me, palm open. “Look at it, Sarah. Read the messages. It’s all in there. Everything I couldn’t say.”
I didn’t take the phone. I just looked at his outstretched hand, the cheap device resting in it, suddenly feeling incredibly heavy. It wasn’t the content of the messages that was the betrayal, not in the way I’d first feared. It was the secrecy itself. The locked cabinet. The hidden phone. The hundreds of conversations with ‘Not Sarah’ that should have been had with me.
The air in the garage was thick with unspoken things, the smell of oil and exhaust suddenly suffocating. It wasn’t just about ‘Not Sarah’ anymore. It was about the distance he’d created, brick by silent brick, in the space between us. And looking at him, at the phone, at the dusty floor where my key had fallen, I didn’t know if we could ever find our way back across the chasm he’d dug.