Five years together, and whenever I got into an argument with an outsider, my boyfriend never once took my side.
I always told myself he was just cold by nature, so I fought every battle for him.
On our trip, a seafood restaurant shorted us on the order. I had every reason to argue, and I did, without expecting Byron to lift a finger.
Instead, he said lightly, "They're just scraping by too. Screaming over a few dollars makes you look cheap."
The junior labmate traveling with us kept her head down and mumbled, "It's not exactly classy."
The two of them, playing off each other, pinned me right where I stood.
The manager, who'd been about to refund us, watched me with a smirk, his whole face saying he was enjoying the show.
I didn't cry. I grabbed my bag and went back to the hotel. Byron didn't come after me. He just kept eating with her, like nothing had happened at all.
What he didn't know was that before the trip, I'd added his junior as a friend and seen her social media feed.
That was a completely different version of him. In the video, Byron's face was flushed with rage, and he had a cornered old woman selling vegetables by the arm and wouldn't let go. "My junior was kind enough to buy up all your produce, and you sneak in a rigged scale to squeeze another ten dollars out of her? You're old enough to know better. Have you no shame?"
His junior had captioned it with a starry-eyed emoji: Byron standing up for me is honestly just too hot.
The boyfriend who could never learn to stand on the same side as me knew exactly how to stand up for his junior.
On this trip, the one who didn't belong was always me.
I booked the earliest ticket home. I was done with this trip. And done with this relationship, too.
...
It wasn't AI-generated. It wasn't a joke edit.
That was the gentle, well-mannered Byron Henson. For the sake of his junior, Bernice Bates.
Standing in the middle of a busy street, gripping a woman in her seventies or eighties, furiously calling her out for having no shame at her age.
I found it absurd. The owner of that seafood restaurant, with all his money and property, and Byron could feel sorry for the man, could say he wasn't having it easy.
But faced with a vegetable farmer who'd overcharged his junior by ten dollars, Byron had suddenly learned how to stand up for someone.
It hit me then. It didn't matter who the other party was. Who was standing beside him decided his attitude.
With me, he'd play the bystander and stay silent, and when it counted, he'd stand on the opposite side and play the nice guy.
But if it was his junior, he suddenly knew all about a united front, about standing up for her and settling her scores.
Pointless. Truly.
From the first time I heard the name Bernice, some instinct as a woman told me this girl was different.
At first Byron would complain to me. "She's hopeless. Can't even get the basic lab procedures right. I genuinely can't understand how she passed the grad exams."
But later it turned into him telling me with a smile, "Sweet, innocent little thing. She made me some milk tea by hand."
And then he deleted the pinned post on his feed of us holding hands, and switched to a couples' avatar.
He said, "I'll be coordinating with people higher up. It's not convenient."
The time he set aside for our dates started shrinking. From coming with me to the library, from going out to eat.
Into saving library seats for his junior, tutoring her, doing her research with her.
Little by little, I went from the girlfriend at the center of his life to someone on the margins.
I kept telling myself it was a normal senior-junior thing between them.
But once, my own junior bought me a milk tea to thank me for lending him my notes.
Byron's face went cold on the spot, and he said the guy had bad intentions toward me.
That was when it stunned me. So he understood all along what crossing a line looked like.
Yet this trip, the two of us had planned for so long, he forced his junior onto it.
When I showed I wasn't happy, he'd just look at me, put-upon, and say, "Can you not make everything about attraction? I'm just an older brother looking after a younger sister."
I clutched my phone, my eyes burning.
I held it in for a long time, but in the end I couldn't, and I broke down crying.
Crying until I could barely breathe, when the screen lit up.
A message from Byron.
I picked it up and opened it. Six words, nothing more: Come down to the front desk.
I ignored him and shut the screen off.
I was pouring myself a glass of water when Byron called, his voice full of urgency. "Come down to the front desk. Right now, immediately."
Thinking about everything that had happened today, I had no intention of humoring him, but I was also worried it might be a real emergency.
So I went downstairs in the hotel slippers, and the moment I reached the front desk, Byron started talking.
