We sat there as the morning light crept across the kitchen floor, two people who loved each other and had no idea how to make that love enough.
I thought about our wedding. The olive branches overhead. The vows we'd written ourselves, promises about honesty and partnership and choosing each other even when it was hard. I'd meant every word. I still meant them.
But meaning something and being able to deliver on it were two different things.
"Maybe we take some time," I said finally. "Figure out what we really want instead of just reacting to offers and opportunities."
"Time apart?"
"I don't know. Maybe." I pulled my hand back, wrapping my arms around myself. The kitchen felt cold, though the thermostat read seventy-two. "I can't think right now. Everything feels impossible."
Cassian looked like he wanted to argue. Wanted to tell me we could figure it out, that love would find a way, that we were stronger than this. But he just nodded, his shoulders slumping with a defeat that mirrored my own.
"Okay," he said. "We'll take time."
Neither of us acknowledged what "time" really meant. Neither of us was ready to say the word "divorce" out loud.
But it was there, waiting in the silence between us. Patient. Inevitable.
That afternoon, I went for a walk.
I couldn't stay in the apartment. Couldn't breathe in a space that suddenly felt too small and too empty at the same time, the walls pressing in while the rooms echoed with absence. I grabbed my jacket and left without telling Cassian where I was going. He didn't ask.
My feet carried me to the park where he'd proposed three years earlier. I didn't plan to come here. Didn't consciously choose this destination. But my body remembered what my mind tried to forget, and before I knew it, I was standing in front of the bench overlooking the lake.
I sat down.
The trees overhead were the same. The water was the same, gray-green and rippling in the afternoon breeze. Even the ducks looked familiar, paddling past in their eternal, untroubled circles.
Everything was the same. Everything except us.
Cassian had been so nervous that day. He'd had a whole speech prepared, pages of notes he'd rehearsed in front ofthe bathroom mirror for a week. I'd found the drafts later, crumpled in his desk drawer, each version more elaborate than the last.
But when the moment came, he'd forgotten all of it. We'd been eating sandwiches on this very bench, and he'd suddenly gone quiet. Then he'd pulled out the ring, hands shaking so badly he nearly dropped it, and asked me point-blank.
"Will you marry me? I had a speech, but I forgot it. Just say yes. Please."
I'd laughed so hard I'd nearly choked on my sandwich. Then I'd said yes.
That felt like a lifetime ago. A different version of us, younger and stupider and so convinced that love would be enough.
I pulled out my phone and stared at my contacts. I needed to talk to someone. Needed to say the words out loud before they suffocated me.
I called Felice.
"Hey," she answered on the second ring. "What's wrong?"
"How do you know anything's wrong?"
"Because you're calling me on a Sunday afternoon instead of being disgustingly domestic with your husband. And I can hear it in your voice. You sound like you've been crying."
I hadn't cried. I didn't cry in front of people, and I couldn't seem to cry alone. The tears were there, trapped somewhere behind my sternum, but they wouldn't fall.
"Cassian and I just talked about separating."
Silence on the other end. Long enough that I checked to make sure the call hadn't dropped.
Then: "Oh, Calla."
