Not the worried ones. Not the desperate ones. Not the angry ones—nor the humiliated ones, where I told her she needed to come back. Needed to come home and fix everything that, all of a sudden, shattered.
Those last ones weren’t really typed by me, though, but by the cheap bottle of whiskey now empty beside me. If I’m being honest, I don’t even remember writing them.
What I do remember is kicking the bedroom door until it hung crooked on its hinges. I remember hurling the empty glass at the window, shattering it, when the effect of the whiskey wore off and there wasn’t a single drop of amber liquid left to numb me again.
I remember tearing apart the photographs that brought me to this miserable state. And I remember crying. Not because I was drunk. Not because I was angry. But because with every second dragged along by the clock’s hand, the truth became harder to deny: there is no explanation for the images now torn to pieces across the floor.
There is no way to fix this.
By involving an innocent child in her games, Nina condemned me to never being able to forgive her. She did the one thing I will never be able to forget: she used an innocent life the same way one was once used against me.
This goes beyond who I was willing to be for us. This is about how I was made. And the pain of that certainty only makes everything worse.
I avoid taking breaths that are too deep for the same reason I refused to sleep in my own bed—to run from her scent, which is suddenly everywhere. Nina is everywhere.
In the house still mostly empty, because she took her time choosing the interior design. In the pair of shoes still abandoned by the door. In the clothes carefully folded on the rack in the bedroom.
She’s in the hairbrush by the bathroom sink, in the raspberry soap in the shower, in the vanilla shampoo too. She’s in my soul, engraved so deeply that not even the undeniable proof of her betrayal managed to tear her out of there—quite the opposite.
Those photos—those damned photos—turned every fiber that keeps her lodged inside me into chains, strangling my heart until it’s on the verge of breaking beyond repair.
It will break. I know it will.
“She cheated on me,” I say the words out loud.
It’s a kind of shock therapy I’ve been attempting all night. If I keep saying it, maybe it’ll become easier to believe, to accept, and to act accordingly—instead of crawling through the house and my own conscience toward the woman I thought I would share my life with.
The raw, scraped knuckles on my fingers—how they got that way, I don’t even remember—are perfect metaphors for the wounds that opened inside me with every small piece of this puzzle called Nina that fell into place.
The fact that she seemed so perfect to me should have been a warning sign, shouldn’t it? No one is perfect. But Nina was. I should have suspected it, at the very least.
The rumors that spread across the island like nothing I’d ever seen—ones that initially sounded like tasteless jokes—now slot neatly into the half-truths I was told.
There are so many unforgivable things in this story. The terror I felt when she disappeared—my fear, my anxiety, thatold, buried feeling of abandonment—none of it compares to the dread that her reason for seeking distance and solitude might have been to gather the courage to admit she wanted an abortion.
The thought that Nina would return only to tell me she wanted none of the life I was so desperate to offer her—that she wanted her dreams back, her plans, her youth and her freedom—was devastating.
My fear was that, as promised, I would have to accept it and support her, even if it shattered whatever piece of me still moves. And the worst part is that, even broken, I would have stood by her, trying to keep her pieces intact.
The doorbell echoes through the empty apartment, and I remain seated, right where I am. It rings a second time, then a third, and even after minutes pass, I don’t get up. It’s only on the fifth ring that I decide it’s better to end everything once and for all.
My steps to the door are slow. I don’t bother putting on a shirt, cleaning the blood from my hands, or hiding the chaos screaming around me. Nina earned the right to see the work she did, didn’t she?
It isn’t Nina I find in the entryway, though. I don’t even know why I keep hoping it will be. She doesn’t need to ring the bell—her fingerprint is registered on the electronic lock.
Atlas, Apollo, and Drako stand there instead, paper bags in their arms, laughing among themselves, carefree.
“You promised dinner and a surprise,” Drako says, leading the invasion of my apartment without even bothering to look at me.
“We already figured out what the surprise is, and since dinner didn’t happen, we brought breakfast,” Apollo adds.
“Where’s the bride?” Drako speaks again. “Apollo and I will be the groomsmen, and Atlas will try not to be sad about it, but it’s not our fault he drew the short straw. We won fair and square.” He says it as he sets the bags down on the island of the open-plan kitchen.
It takes almost a full minute for my friends to make themselves comfortable in my kitchen and finally look at me.
I watch the smiles vanish from their faces as each of the three pairs of eyes scans me from head to toe, only to snap back—alarmed—to my face.
And as if the lights in the house have only now been switched on for them, their next target is the destruction scattered around us.
