A month after the wedding, Hana finally opened the box of unnecessary crystal glasses. She intended to exchange them for ordinary plates. Beneath the decorative paper, she found an envelope containing a hotel receipt in her husband Emir's name. The date was two days before their wedding. That evening, he had arrived late for a family dinner because he was supposedly driving a friend whose car had broken down outside town.
The receipt could have several explanations, so she didn't photograph it for the family group. She placed it before Emir when he came home. He immediately said he had paid for a friend's room. Hana asked the name. He gave one, then admitted it hadn't been a friend when she reached for her phone. He had met his former partner, Lana. He needed, he said, to close an old chapter before their new life.
"Why did closing it take until morning?" she asked. Emir stared at the glasses beside the sink. He admitted that they had continued their relationship for several weeks, until the wedding. Hana remembered Lana standing near the exit at the reception, introduced as an acquaintance from university. Imagining the hotel room wasn't the hardest part. It was hearing her husband try to reduce a decision to an insignificant mistake while she had been choosing his surname that same week.
She contacted Lana with a brief message saying that she knew about the hotel and wanted no intimate details. Lana confirmed the meetings and said she had believed the wedding was postponed. She sent only the message in which Emir claimed that. Hana asked for no further proof. The same lie had two different audiences. She thanked her for answering and ended the conversation before it became a comparison of the two women.
The next day, she postponed their joint mortgage appointment. She told Emir she wouldn't decide about their marriage in front of a bank employee. She temporarily moved into her sister's small apartment, sleeping on the couch and hating the morning tram noise. Relatives said she should consider the money spent on the wedding. Hana listened, then replied that the restaurant had no vote in her life.
After several conversations with professional support, she decided to seek a divorce. Emir finally stopped talking about a single hotel and acknowledged the entire sequence of lies. That helped her leave without doubting her own memory. She exchanged the crystal glasses for six blue plates. During the first dinner in her new apartment, one serving of pasta cooled while she called her sister. It wasn't ceremonial, but nobody was arriving late from an invented place.