On our wedding night, the big screen suddenly lit up with a video of me holding a woman and kissing her.
There was nothing I could say that anyone would believe. My father-in-law hauled me out of the room to make me account for myself.
By the time I'd proven the video was an AI fake, my bride had already gone off with the family's adopted son and, out of pure spite, consummated her marriage with him instead.
My mother sighed without a flicker of change on her face.
"What's done is done. Whatever was going to happen has already happened. All you can do now is accept it and never bring it up again."
After that night, something curdled between me and Freda Harding. Every time she tried to touch me, I found some excuse and pushed her away.
She was miserable for a long time, and I couldn't stand watching her cry. So I made up my mind to take her back.
But outside the door of the private room, through the crack, I heard every word she said to her friends.
"Freda, you're basically a love expert at this point."
"To think it was all because you saw Sid Delgado come back home and wanted to fix that old regret between you two. So you had someone use AI to fake a cheating video of Duane Dickerson and frame him, just so your dad would drag him out of the room, and then the two of you could go for it!"
"Genius!"
"Your whole family was in on it, even his own mother. Only that idiot Duane had no idea about any of it."
Freda laid a hand on her stomach. "And now I'm even carrying Sid's baby. I don't even know how I'm supposed to tell him."
...
She must not have been sleeping well; there were dark shadows under her eyes. The pregnancy had come out of nowhere. Even she hadn't seen it coming.
Her best friend Pat Delgado came over and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. "Freda, you've only got two choices now."
"One, you split up with Duane. Or two, you get rid of the baby and keep your distance from Sid for good."
Two choices, and somehow they stumped her. Freda had always been decisive, quick and clean about everything. She'd never wavered like this before.
She kept her hand pressed over her belly for a long time, unable to let go.
"No. I'm not getting rid of the baby."
"He's what came out of the regret between me and Sid. I can't be Sid's wife, so I'll have his child instead. Something to hold on to."
Outside the door, everything in me went cold.
So the cheating video that framed me was Freda's doing all along, done for one reason only: to give her an excuse to get me out of the way so she could smother that old regret with Sid.
Their regret was that they'd never ended up together? I couldn't help a bleak little laugh.
What I hadn't imagined was that my in-laws and my own mother knew too. They had all banded together to deceive me.
I thought back to when that video of my "affair" was playing on the screen. My mother-in-law slapped me across the face. My father-in-law grabbed a fistful of my hair and dragged me out.
My own mother apologized to everyone, red-faced with shame, and called me an animal.
Freda cried and said I'd wronged her, and swore she'd pay me back for it.
My nails dug into my flesh. Something was jammed up in my chest, aching and airless at once.
I slumped back hard against the wall and stood there sideways, gutted, half out of my body.
Freda had already made her choice.
"I'm not splitting up with Duane, because I know love and marriage are two separate accounts."
"Duane loves me. He goes along with everything I want, and he never drags his feet about anything. He's the most suitable one to be my husband."
"Please. As if Sid doesn't do all that too?"
Freda picked up her juice and took a sip.
"Sid's a bit of a chauvinist, the domineering type who has to have the last word. He's better suited as a lover."
The whole room burst out laughing.
"So you're saying Duane's the one wearing the horns!"
"How can you bully the poor guy like that?"
"Hahaha!!"
Then Pat's teasing dropped away and her voice turned dead serious.
"Then I've got to wonder about something."
Everyone perked up at the sudden shift in her tone.
"There's no way you got pregnant with Sid's baby in a single night!"
"It had to be more than a few times, right!"
Freda's face went red in an instant, like some naive girl fresh out into the world.
