His handwriting.
“Found someone new. Wanted to tell you first. Also, our daughter…I need an answer about moving her from the garden at the house to somewhere proper. Mum knows a place. I said as much in the divorce papers.”
He signed it with a kiss.
A fucking kiss.
My breath broke.
My chest cracked.
My palms went numb.
To ask to move Gracie, our daughter, like she was a misplaced ornament…It tore the last threads holding me upright.
I pressed my forehead to the carpet.
No more.
He doesn’t get to break me anymore. Not when Dane is building me skyward.
I dragged my laptop close, flipped it open with shaking hands.
And I wrote.
I wrote like bleeding.
Like resurrection.
Like every memory, every wound, every truth was a spell I needed to cast to survive.
Between the sobs, between the keys tapping like prayer, I felt it:
Dane isn’t just a man.
He’s a lighthouse.
And I’m done drowning.
DANE
Leaving Penn’s office felt like walking out of a fire I’d willingly thrown myself into. My smirk was for show. The swagger? Habit. A trick I’d mastered young move like nothing can touch you, so no one sees the places already burned.
But her eyes…Christ. Her eyes stuck to me like grief with teeth.
I kept walking, boots heavy against the corporate carpet, pretending my pulse wasn’t lodged in my throat. Mail under my arm. Her softness under my skin.
Every time I blinked, I saw that envelope in her hands. His handwriting. Her tears.
I wanted to go back in there, pick her up, walk her straight out the front doors and home. My home. Where the world couldn’t touch her. Where I could ask why she still lets that man bruise her heart with paper cuts.
But I couldn’t.
Not yet.
So, I shoved open the stairwell door, leaning into the cool concrete air that always felt more honest than anything upstairs. I exhaled hard. The sound bounced off the walls.
“Get a grip,” I muttered. My voice didn’t listen.
