After I Found His Secret Reddit Confession to My Best Friend

It was 2 a.m. on a Tuesday, and I couldn't sleep. That wasn't new. I'd been an insomniac since freshman year, and my cure was always the same — lie in the dark of my dorm room and scroll Reddit until my eyes hurt. Amber, my roommate, called it my "digital rosary." She wasn't wrong.

I landed on a confession thread. Some anonymous account, a wall of text under a title that made my stomach drop before I even understood why: *I don't love her. I love someone else and I can't stop.*

I almost scrolled past it. I don't know why I didn't.

The details were too specific. *The girl with the round face and the softer body.* *The friend who's been out of reach for six years.* My hands went cold before my brain caught up. I read it again. Then a third time, slower, like if I read it carefully enough it would turn into something else.

He wrote that he only started dating her to stay close to someone. That she was convenient. That he laughed with strangers online about her thighs. That he closed his eyes when he touched her and thought of someone else.

I opened my texts with Kellan. The last one was from two hours ago. *Goodnight, love.* A little red heart under it.

I checked the post's timestamp. Forty minutes after that heart.

I didn't call him. I didn't call Sloane, either, even though some old, obedient part of me wanted to — wanted her to tell me it was a coincidence, wanted her to laugh and say *Ellie, that's not him, that's not us.* But I already knew. Six years. Out of reach. There was only one friend in Kellan's life who fit that description, and she was somewhere over the Atlantic right now, flying home from Paris.

I sat very still on my bed for a long time. Then I opened the app store and typed *calorie counter* into the search bar. I picked the first one that came up, the one with a cartoon apple for a logo, and set my daily limit to 800.

I lay down fully dressed and stared at the ceiling until the window went from black to grey.

Amber found me like that at seven, still in yesterday's jeans, my mascara dried into two grey half-moons under my eyes.

"You didn't sleep," she said. Not a question.

"No."

"You okay?"

"Didn't sleep well," I said, which wasn't a lie, exactly. I got up and started the coffee maker so she'd stop looking at me like that.

For the next few days I couldn't stop replaying us. Every memory came back different now, like someone had switched the lighting. I thought about the nights Kellan had been sweetest — the nights he pulled me in close, kissed my hair, told me I was beautiful in that soft, private voice. I used to think those were just his moods. Now I went digging.

I pulled up my camera roll and lined it up against Sloane's Instagram, scrolling back months, checking dates. A rooftop shot of her in Paris, laughing, wine glass tilted. That same night, Kellan had shown up at my door with flowers for no reason. A photo of her at some gallery opening, arm around a stranger. That same week, Kellan had been unusually attentive, texting all day, calling just to hear my voice.

The pattern wasn't loose. It was almost exact. Every time she surfaced online, he reached for me like I was something to hold on to. Not because he wanted me. Because he needed somewhere to put it.

I closed the camera roll. I opened the calorie app instead. It felt like the only thing in my life that still made sense — numbers going down, control going up.

I tried one small test. There was a concert that weekend, a band we'd talked about seeing since spring. I asked him Wednesday night, casual, my voice light. "Want to go Saturday? I still have to get tickets."

He didn't even look up from his laptop. "Can't. I've got a thing that weekend."

"What thing?"

"Just — stuff with the guys. I'll make it up to you."

He didn't say Sloane's name. He didn't say he was helping plan her welcome-home dinner, or that he'd offered to pick her up from JFK himself. I found that out later, by accident, the way I found out everything now — sideways, through a crack in a door he thought was closed.

That night, after he fell asleep on our shared laptop, I checked the browser history. Seventeen searches. Same flight number, refreshed over and over, like a heartbeat he couldn't stop checking.

I closed the laptop gently. I didn't slam it. I didn't wake him.

I went to bed and logged my dinner into the app. Six hundred calories. Two hundred under my limit.

It felt, God help me, like winning.