Coffee sat beside me, rubbing slow circles on my back.
I finally lifted my head, eyes swollen. “I think I just ruined my life.”
She pulled me into her arms again. “You shook up a lot of things,” she said. “But you didn’t ruin your life.”
I shook my head violently. “He hasn’t even called me,” I cried. “I know he hates me. My husband hates me.”
Coffee kissed the side of my head while holding me tighter. “He doesn’t hate you. He’s hurt. Big difference.”
I sniffled.
“He called me,” she added before my head snapped up.
“What?”
“He called to make sure you were okay before you got here. I told him you cried yourself to sleep but you were safe.”
Relief hit me so hard it hurt and that made me cry even harder.
“He doesn’t want to talk to me,” I whispered.
“Good,” Coffee said. I blinked at her like she was crazy.
She leaned back “Because right now you don’t need to talk to him. You need to get yourself together.”
“I’m gonna let you sit in this depressing ass mess tonight,” she continued. “You can cry. You can hate yourself. You can feel every bit of this.”
She pointed at me. “But tomorrow morning? You getting the hell up out of it.”
Coffee crossed her legs on the bed, looking at me like a therapist who loved me too much to lie.
“You let your mind convince you that everything you were doing made sense,” she said. “You got so deep in your feelings that reality stopped existing.”
“You built an illusion, Khloe. One where your pain justified your choices. One where your loneliness made the rules.”
“Yes,” she continued. “Kairo dropped the ball. A lot. You were starving emotionally, and that man stopped feeding your marriage the way he should have.”
Tears slid down my face again.
“But instead of fixing the hunger,” she said, “you went outside your house to eat.”
“You didn’t just go get attention,” Coffee said. “You went and collected pieces of yourself from another man. You caught feelings for someone who was mentally fucking you from day one.”
She wasn’t wrong.
“I can’t even be mad at Stacks,” she said, shaking her head. “You think he was supposed to sit around getting crumbs while you went home every night to your husband?”
“If a married man came to me talking about how unhappy he was at home,” Coffee said, “I’m supposed to believe everything he tells me without ever seeing his real life with my own eyes? Come on, Khloe.”
She leaned closer. “You don’t know what happens behind closed doors when you’re not there.”
“If you were gonna fuck him,” she said bluntly, “then just fuck him. I told you that.”
Despite everything, I let out a small broken laugh.
“But you didn’t,” she said softly. “You built emotions. You built dreams. You built something that never had space to stand. And now it has collapsed.”
Coffee took my face in her hands. “What happens next?” she said, rubbing my fingers. “That’s on you.”
