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AITA for telling my sister what I read in her notebook after she left it open in my kitchen?

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The first sentence I saw was my name. I read the next three pages.

My sister had left her notebook open on the kitchen counter after staying with me overnight. I initially thought it was the recipe notebook she carries around. Once I read the first paragraph, I knew it was something private. I kept reading because it described how she sometimes finds me exhausting.

When she came back for it, I said, "If you think I turn every conversation into a competition, you could tell me to my face."

She looked at the notebook and asked how much I'd read. I told her. She said the pages were her working through a bad evening, not a message she'd chosen to send me. I said leaving it open in a shared kitchen made it hard not to see.

That's true of the first line. It isn't true of the rest. I wanted to know what else she thought.

She has apologized for one specific remark from the evening we'd argued about, but refuses to discuss the notebook paragraph by paragraph. I keep thinking that if she wrote those things, they matter even if I wasn't meant to read them.

She says I took both her privacy and her chance to decide how to talk to me. AITA for raising what I found rather than pretending I hadn't seen it?

Discussion

1 community replies

The first glance may have been accidental. Three pages after realizing it was private weren't. Treating the open notebook as the explanation for the whole read avoids the decision you actually made.

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