“” – Laura Bailey
It was supposed to be a clean slate.
A family trip. Sun, sea, and the illusion of a reset following Laura’s most recent infidelity.
Our flight to Mallorca left in the early afternoon. By the time we reached the airport, Laura had already finished two bottles of prosecco.
At the gate she decided she needed to hold all four passports and boarding passes. She was insistent. I had checked us in, but by the time we were descending the stairs to board, she was demanding them. I gave in, keeping only my own.
She tucked hers into her purse, then, brilliantly, put our daughter’s and the nanny’s into the stroller that was being gate-checked.
Predictably, the stroller was loaded into the cargo hold, which meant the passports were on their way to baggage claim, after passport control.
Hours later, after a long delay and an even longer flight, we landed in Mallorca.
Approaching passport control, Laura realised what she’d done. Only her own passport remained. The others were somewhere under a pile of suitcases.
I managed, somehow, to talk the four of us through passport control and retrieve the documents when the stroller finally appeared. It was a small miracle they hadn’t fallen out; they’d been shoved into an open pocket like a dare.
By the time we reached the villa, Laura was done. She went straight to bed, leaving me and the nanny to unpack, feed Fleur, and get her down for the night.
Still shaken from the airport chaos, I sent Laura a message apologizing for being short-tempered. I hoped we could reset in the morning. That was always the dance: apologize first, even when the disaster was hers, or pay for it later.
That was the pattern. Every crisis required tribute. Every apology was currency.
Months later, that same text, the olive branch I’d offered to keep the peace, was twisted into “proof” that I had raped her that evening. What I thought was an apology for an argument became the foundation of a story that never happened.
I thought I was smoothing things over after a fight about passports. I didn’t realise I wasn’t offering an olive branch; I was handing her a weapon.