The sentence broke off, slashed through violently.
Below it, new lines crowded the page, darker, more desperate:
‘I can’t stop thinking. One question keeps coming back to me again and again… Does Alexander not like me anymore?’
Alexander’s chest tightened painfully.
‘Every time he gets angry with me or suddenly changes the way he treats me, my stomach drops with panic. Maybe something is wrong with me.’
His fingers curled slightly around the paper. The words felt like knives.
‘But every day when he doesn’t look at me, I keep thinking… does he not like me anymore?’
His breathing grew shallow.
‘Should I leave his house? I don’t want to be a burden on him.’
Something inside Alexander cracked.
She hadn’t writtenour house.
Not once.
At the bottom of the page, in tiny, fragile handwriting were the words:
‘I don’t want to be a burden on anyone ever again.’
Alexander’s chest constricted violently, as if something heavy had slammed into him. His throat tightened, burning. He hadn’trealized—had never imagined—that his silence, his distance, his brief anger could shake her so deeply.
Even after marriage… she still didn’t see his home as hers.
His fingers clenched the paper, knuckles whitening as his heart caved in on itself. Guilt, love, and a crushing grief tangled in his chest, each breath harder than the last.
Then he saw another page.
A photograph.
He recognized it instantly.
It was him—captured from a live news broadcast. The image was slightly blurry, clearly taken from a phone pointed at a television screen. The timestamp was unmistakable.
The date punched him in the gut.
It was after Mia had already left his house.
Beneath the photo, her handwriting trembled:
‘Can love disappear after he is used to having me around?’
Alexander’s pulse thundered in his ears.
‘Or will he remove me from his life after a few years once he realizes I truly don’t bring anything into his life?’
His chest tightened so violently he had to swallow just to breathe.
His hands trembled as he folded the papers carefully. He slid them into his pocket, pressing them close to his body, as though that could somehow protect her from the fears she had poured onto them.
Every muscle in his body was taut. His mind raced, unable to process how deeply her doubts ran—how quietly she had been suffering, alone, while loving him.
