When Chloe uses her fiancé’s laptop, she discovers intimate and incriminating emails between him and another woman. As she confronts him, she realizes that her entire world is about to change—but she wants to do more than just ‘leave’ him. Instead, she interferes with his belongings first.

As I stood in the middle of what used to be our living room, the weight of betrayal heavy on my shoulders, I realized that I wasn’t going to leave quietly.

I wanted to stand up for myself. I wanted Dale to feel even a tiny bit of the hurt I was feeling. I wanted to inconvenience him at every chance I got.

It all happened by accident. I had left my laptop charger at the office, and I needed to make an online payment—so, I used Dale’s laptop.

Only to stumble upon enlightening emails with graphic details that no partner would ever want to stumble upon.

As I went through the emails—dirty love letters between Dale and some woman named Mandy—he was in the kitchen, cooking us dinner.

“How much chili is too much?” Dale called out, oblivious to the secrets I was uncovering.

“You decide,” I said, my heart breaking as I closed his emails and shut off the laptop.

I didn’t know whether I should storm into the kitchen and throw a tantrum about the emails. Dale and I were set to get married in the next six months—our wedding invitations were already out.

Walking into the kitchen, my fiancé was chopping up vegetables and humming to music that played from his phone on the counter.

I realized that I couldn’t stand the look on his face.

Suddenly he looked different to me—a shadow of the man who I was supposed to marry.

“So, Mandy, huh?” I said.

Dale looked at me, his face frozen.

We spent thirty minutes going back and forth between us. Dale went on and on about how Mandy didn’t mean anything to him.

“Mandy was just for me to realize how good I have it with you,” Dale said, taking a bottle of vodka out of the cupboard.

“And that’s an acceptable reason?” I asked, genuinely shocked that he was trying to gaslight me.

Eventually, Dale ended up packing a bag.

“I’m going to stay with my brother,” he said. “We need to cool off.”

“Give me a few days, and I’ll be out of here,” I said. “I need to get my things out. I’m done.”

Dale had the decency not to question me further.

“A week, Chloe,” he said, picking up his bag and walking to the door.

I went to bed that night thinking about all the things I needed to do—with the first thing being to cancel my wedding and everything that came with that.

I thought about my wedding dress—a custom gown that was going to be ready in two weeks. That had to be torn up.

The next morning, I made some coffee and stared out of the kitchen window. I had never been so angry and devastated in my entire life.

Dale had been the one—the one that I was convinced I would grow old with.

But now, I needed to do more. I couldn’t just end it like this—by me moving back into my parents’ home at the end of the week.

No. I needed more. I wanted to be petty.

My first act of creative vengeance? Dale’s precious tablet.

He carried it everywhere, but in the heat of the moment from the night before, he had left it on the kitchen counter.

With a few quick taps, I changed every setting to French. Dale never did bother to learn a word of it, despite our dream of honeymooning in Paris by the end of the year. Imagine his confusion when every app, every instruction, and even Siri only responded in French.

But why stop there?

Dale’s obsession with a perfectly set thermostat gave me another deliciously devilish idea. I replaced his digital thermostat with an identical one—one that was programmed to randomly alter temperatures throughout the day.

A lovely forty degrees at breakfast and a tropical eighty-five by dinner should provide a lovely, unpredictable ambiance.

Dale would hate it.

I went back into the kitchen and made myself some eggs on toast, while deciding what to do next.

I knew that a part of me was being childish, and that everything was unnecessary. But I needed to do it. Everything in me screamed out that I needed to lash out.

Next, I tackled his beloved morning routine. I knew how meticulous Dale was about his coffee—I swapped his regular coffee beans for decaf. I could almost picture his puzzled frown over why his morning cup of coffee no longer woke him up.

He would be irritable and moody, and he would bite at anyone who tried to talk him down from his mood.

For a little extra sparkle, I mixed in a generous amount of salt with his sugar. That first sip would surely offer a shocking start to his day.

I went into the bedroom and began to pack my clothing into whatever suitcases I had—whatever else would be thrown into bin bags and loaded into my car.

I didn’t know what else to do. I just needed to keep moving. To keep my hands and mind busy while I figured out what to do about my feelings.

Other than being devastated, I didn’t know how to feel about Dale—betrayal and cheating was one thing. But at the end of the day, I felt a deep sense of loss, too.

“Well, it makes sense, Chloe,” my friend Rosa said when she came over to check on me.

She plated up the Chinese food that she brought while I poured glasses of wine for us.

“You thought that you were going to marry the man,” she said. “It’s only natural for you to feel this way.”

Rosa promised to help me make all the calls to cancel the wedding.

“We’ll make a list of everything we need to cancel, and split it.”

Rosa reassured me, and for the first time since finding out about Dale, I felt that I’d be okay.

Before leaving the next day, I tackled his entertainment system, the pride of his living room. I flipped through the settings, I locked all his favorite channels using a parental control PIN known only to myself.

“Try binge-watching now,” I scoffed, imagining his frustration as he mashed the remote buttons in vain.

Each step was a cathartic release, my heart stitching itself back together with every subtle sabotage. I walked through each room slowly, a final goodbye to each shared memory, then I left my house keys on the hallway table.

“This is it,” I said to the silent house. “It’s the end of the Dale chapter.”

At the end of the week, when I was sorting out through my clothes at my parents’ house, my phone lit up incessantly with Dale’s texts.

First, confusion. Then, annoyance.

Gradually, desperation crept into his messages.

As I left the messages unread, Dale ended up calling me.

“Why is the house freezing when I wake up?” he demanded, his voice threatening.

“Maybe check your thermostat settings,” I replied, my fingers hesitating for a moment before hitting send.

“And what did you do to the coffee machine? And the TV just won’t work! Chloe!” he exclaimed.

I guess some things just don’t stop working, like your loyalty.

I texted back to him.

But Dale continued to text me—I knew that he felt the prick of my absence, a lingering reminder of the chaos that he had brought into our lives.

I blocked his number shortly after, needing to end the cycle. Dale, becoming just another part of my past.

What would you have done?