I told my fiancé Tyler was only coming to congratulate us, but one private kiss outside our engagement party exposed the messages I thought I'd hidden.

Three weeks after that night, on a blustery Friday in mid-January, Marcus was staying over at my apartment.

The snow was falling in thick, silent sheets outside the frosted windowpanes. The radiator clanked rhythmically, filling the studio with dry, comforting warmth. Marcus was sitting on the rug near the sofa, wearing an old gray sweatshirt, going through an old leather box of keepsakes I had brought from my mother’s house.

I was at the stove, pouring peppermint tea into two ceramic mugs, my heart lighter than it had been in over a year. We had spent the evening laughing, talking about taking a quiet weekend trip up to Maine in February, rebuilding the foundation brick by painstaking brick.

"Hey, Jess," Marcus called out from the floor, his voice curious. "What's this?"

I turned around, holding the two steaming mugs. "What's what?"

Marcus was holding an old, battered smartphone—my previous phone, the one I had abruptly replaced the week after our engagement party when Tyler had first made contact. I had forgotten it was buried in the bottom of that cedar memory box.

"It’s my old phone from college," I said, walking over and handing him his tea, sitting beside him on the rug. "The screen cracked, so I swapped it out right before... well, you know."

Marcus turned the device over in his hands. It had a sleek black case with a tiny scratch near the camera lens. He pressed the power button, but the battery was completely dead.

"I found a charger that fits this in the junk drawer earlier," Marcus said casually, reaching under the side table and plugging the cord into the port. A faint red battery icon flickered onto the cracked screen. "I was looking for some of our old road trip photos from Yellowstone. You said you took them on this one, right?"

"Yeah," I said with a soft smile, leaning my head against his shoulder. "The trip where the radiator blew in the middle of Montana and we slept at that terrifying motel."

The phone chimed as it powered up, the screen glowing bright against the dim room.

I reached out to take it from him to navigate to the photo gallery, but before my fingers touched the glass, the phone vibrated violently against Marcus’s palm.

*Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.*

Dozens of notifications began flooding the screen simultaneously, backed-up cloud messages that had never synced because the phone had been turned off for over fourteen months.

Marcus stared at the screen.

Then, his entire posture stiffened. The warmth that had filled his body evaporated instantly. His jaw locked, and the mug of hot tea in his other hand tilted dangerously, sloshing onto the hardwood floor.

"Marcus?" I whispered, a sudden, ice-cold dread clutching my throat. "What is it?"

He didn't answer. He slowly held the phone out so I could see the screen.

It was a text message thread that had just synced from a cloud backup dated October 14th of last year—the exact afternoon of our engagement party, three hours before Marcus had found Tyler and me in the garden.

The contact name at the top of the thread read: **Tyler.**

The message, sent from my account, read:

*I’m going through with the party tonight, but you know Marcus is just the safe choice. Meet me at the end of the terrace at nine. If you still want me, tell me tonight, and I won't sign the marriage license on Monday.*

I stared at the screen, my vision tunneling, my breath seizing in my chest.

"I didn't write that," I gasped, the words tumbling out in a frantic, hysterical rush. "Marcus, I swear to God on my life, I didn't send that! I never saw that text! I never typed those words!"

Marcus slowly set his mug down on the floor. He looked at me, and in his eyes, I saw the horrifying, instantaneous return of the exact same dead, hollow darkness from the night our world had ended.

"The time stamp is three o'clock, Jess," Marcus whispered, his voice shaking with a terrifying mixture of rage and betrayal. "You were getting your hair done at the salon. You had your phone with you."

"Someone else had to—Tyler must have—"

Before I could finish the sentence, the heavy wooden door of my apartment rattled with three loud, frantic, pounding knocks.

Marcus jumped up, his eyes locked on the door.

"Don't answer it," I begged, scrambling to my feet, terrified of what was unfolding.