I went on a date with an old friend who had returned from abroad. If I had told my boyfriend I was going on that date, he would have said no, so I lied to him that it was an office event.

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I was on the date with this old friend, laughing and having fun, when my boyfriend appeared out of nowhere. He said, “Is it a drink I can’t buy for you? Of all the things I’ve done for you, you think I can’t bring you to a place like this? So you had to cheat on me with a fake borga?”

I was stunned, just as my old friend was stunned. He tried explaining to my boyfriend that we were just friends, but my boyfriend wouldn’t listen. He was talking at the top of his voice, trying hard to draw other people’s attention. In the end, the waiters came by to ask what the problem was. They helped walk him out of the place.

I’d never been so embarrassed in my life. “How did he even know I was here?” I asked myself. I was in tears on my way home. I texted Joyce, my best friend, to tell her what happened and how embarrassed I was. She blamed my boyfriend and called him a villager for doing that. I said, “It’s not his fault. I would have done the same.”

She asked what I was going to do, and I told her I would go see him tomorrow and explain things to him. She said, “Erica paa, is he the only man on earth? A guy has embarrassed you this way, and you’re the one going to apologise?”

I didn’t listen to her. I went to see my boyfriend the next day and apologised. I made my old friend call him so he could talk to him too. He said no, we had planned to outsmart him. The long and short of it was that we broke up. It hurt like hell to be left when you had the best intentions.

A month later, Joyce had a birthday photoshoot, and the photos came. She gave me her phone to go through the photos. As I was scrolling through them, a text came through. It was a photo sent to her WhatsApp. I opened it and realised my ex had done the photoshoot with her. He’s a photographer.

She never told me she did it with my ex. I kept scrolling through the photos he had sent her on WhatsApp when I came across a screenshot Joyce had sent to him. It was a screenshot of a message I had sent to Joyce. One by one, I went through everything and read the messages, too.

It was Joyce who had told him about my date with the old friend. After he caught us, and I chatted with Joyce, she took screenshots of my messages and sent them to my boyfriend. No betrayal felt more poisonous than this. I was frozen. I wanted to shout. I wanted to rush into the kitchen and pour hot water on her, but I calmed down. When she came in, I handed her phone to her and said, “The pictures are beautiful.”

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On her birthday, I didn’t post about her, though she sent me some of the photos to post. I wrote on my status, “No one deserves to have a friend if this is what we call friendship.” I didn’t attend her birthday party either. When she was ranting about her disappointment, I told her, “I know everything I say to you will end up in screenshots, so I’d rather keep my peace.”

I never said another word about the whole thing, and surprisingly, she never asked what I meant. Our lifelong friendship ended that very day.

—Erica

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