My Wife Took Me to a Nude Beach, but When She Hugged Her Ex, the Smile Suddenly Disappeared from Her Face

That night, when a message from my wife’s former boyfriend appeared on her phone, I realized that I was no longer the only one living in our house.

Lauren was lying beside me and breathing calmly. The even sound of the ceiling fan could be heard in the room, while the phone left on the table in the kitchen was still glowing. The clock showed 2:27.

Yet a few hours earlier, everything seemed to be moving for the better.

“Maybe we should go somewhere where we can no longer hide from each other,” Lauren told me that morning, sitting on the leather sofa in the living room.

“That sounds like a threat.”

“Maybe a threat is exactly what we need.”

Then she told me that there was a nudist beach forty minutes from the city. There, she said, people hid not their bodies, but themselves. I laughed, but Lauren did not laugh.

“If we continue like this, one day we will wake up and discover that nothing is left between us,” she said quietly.

Those words were enough. We left.

On Saturday morning, I put towels, water, and sunscreen into a sun-faded bag. Lauren took only a small white bag. A little wooden shell hung from its handle and lightly knocked with every step.

In the car, she lowered the window. The wind lifted her blond hair, and she looked as happy as I had not seen her for months.

“You are quiet,” she told me.

“I am concentrating emotionally.”

Lauren laughed and put her hand on my knee. At that moment I remembered why I had married her.

People were walking calmly on the beach. No one was looking at anyone. Lauren spread the towel on the sand, turned her face toward the sun, and closed her eyes.

Then a man’s voice sounded behind her back.

“Lauren?”

She froze immediately.

A tall, tanned man was walking toward us. Lauren looked at him, and a light appeared on her face such as I had never noticed for me.

“Ryan?” she said.

They hugged. Not for long. But long enough.

Ryan remembered that in college Lauren always wore the same blue scarf. He remembered her favorite songs, old drawings, and night walks. Lauren laughed. Not politely. With real, free laughter.

I was holding the sunscreen beside them and felt that I had seen a side of my wife that had never been introduced to me.

“Sometimes you need to return to yourself to understand what you have been missing,” Ryan said.

Lauren’s smile disappeared.

When we returned home, we hardly spoke. At 11:43 p.m. her phone lit up. Only one name appeared on the screen—Ryan.

Lauren picked it up quickly.

“It is nothing,” she told me.

I nodded.

But at night, when I heard the sound of a second message from the kitchen, I got out of bed. The cold floor was beneath my feet. I picked up the phone. The screen read: “Today it seemed as if you got your real self back.”

Above it, many more old messages were visible. I reached toward the screen and touched the first conversation with my finger…

The screen opened. The password was the date of our wedding.

At first, ordinary messages appeared. Then I found an old correspondence. Ryan had appeared three weeks earlier.

“Do you miss the girl you were then?” he asked.

Lauren answered: “More than I should.”

Then she wrote that she felt invisible in our marriage. Ryan told her that she had made herself smaller for comfort.

I gripped the kitchen counter so tightly that my fingers hurt.

Then I read about the beach.

Ryan had suggested going there. Lauren had answered him: “I am married.”

Ryan’s answer was: “That does not mean that you no longer exist alive.”

Two days later Lauren wrote to him that I had agreed.

I put the phone down. Everything I thought we had invented to save our relationship looked like a scene staged by someone else.

In the morning Lauren entered the kitchen. I was sitting at the table, and the phone lay in front of me.

“Why did you wake up so early?” she asked me.

“I could not sleep.”

“Are you all right?”

“No.”

I slid the phone toward her. Lauren looked at the screen, and I immediately realized that she was not surprised. Her face did not become confused. It only turned pale.

“Michael…”

“Tell me, how long have you been leaving me?”

She could not answer.

Then the doorbell rang. It was seven in the morning. Lauren slowly turned around, as if she already knew who was standing on the threshold…

Ryan was standing behind the door. He held a paper cup of coffee in his hand, but his gaze was searching only for Lauren.

“What are you doing here?” Lauren asked him.

“You did not answer me. I thought I should make sure you were all right.”

I stood in the doorway.

“Now you are sure.”

Ryan looked at me for the first time. Irritation appeared on his self-confident face.

“This is between you two.”

“No,” I told him. “This was between us until you came in silently.”

Lauren went to the table. Her hands were trembling. The wooden shell on her bag was still lightly knocking. This small sound strangely returned me to that morning when I thought we had a new beginning together.

“I did not want it to happen like this,” Lauren said.

“But it happened,” I answered. “Now tell me everything.”

Ryan shook his head.

“We were just talking.”

I put the phone on the table and opened the correspondence.

“‘I miss you.’ Is this just a conversation?”

Lauren lowered her eyes.

“I did not deceive you physically.”

“But every day you lay beside me and wrote to him what you no longer told me.”

Silence fell. Then Lauren herself took the phone and read the last messages aloud. Ryan was telling her that our house seemed like a prison to him. Lauren answered that staying with me had become only a habit.

Ryan raised his hand.

“I love her.”

Lauren looked at him. Tears filled her eyes.

“You love the woman I was at twenty. You do not know who I have become.”

Ryan fell silent.

And I heard the complete truth for the first time: the beach had not been an attempt to save our relationship. Lauren wanted to show me that she could still be free, while Ryan wanted to prove that he could get her to return to him.

But another file was visible on the phone lying on the table. Its name was only a date—the day before our wedding.

Lauren pressed the file. The first seconds of an old voice recording sounded from it. Then I heard my own voice and the color drained from Ryan’s face…