Sierra kept setting the table for two.
I kept coming home late.
And in the middle of all of it, there was this line I would not cross.
I would never sleep with another woman. I would not text the woman I shouldn’t still be thinking about. I would not walk down the hallway to the PR office unless I absolutely had to.
I thought that line made me honorable.
All it did was give me something to point at so I didn’t have to look at the rest. Because not crossing that line doesn’t change the fact that my heart already did. I might not have physically cheated on Sierra but I most certainly did with my heart.
I scrub a hand over my jaw and look around the room one more time. It already looks less like ours and more like a guest room I’m borrowing for a while.
I stand and head back down the hall before I can talk myself into laying down and never getting up.
In the living room, the late afternoon light has shifted. It falls across the floor in soft lines, lighting up a sliver of dust in the air. The kind Sierra would’ve wiped away with a sigh and a muttered comment about me being useless with a Swiffer.
The couch looks the same. Everything does. That almost makes it worse.
I sink down and finally stop bracing.
The first tear doesn’t feel like anything. Just a hot track down one cheek.
The second one goes with it.
I don’t sob. I just try to breathe through it, sitting there with my elbows on my knees and my head bowed as my eyes burn and finally spill over. It feels weird, crying like this. I’m not good at it. I always feel like I’m doing it wrong.
But for the first time in a long time, there’s no one here to walk in and see me attempting to not fall apart.
No one to fix it.
No one to comfort me.
No one to perform for.
It’s just me and the choices I made and the woman I hurt without meaning to.
“I’m sorry,” I say into the empty room. My voice comes out low, rough, barely there. “I’m so damn sorry, Sierra.”
The words don’t change anything. They don’t rewind her steps or unpack her boxes or erase Griff’s glare. They just sit in the air for a second before sinking into the quiet like everything else.
After a while, everything evens out again. My eyes sting, but the pressure in my chest eases enough that I can sit up and lean back.
The house still feels wrong.
But there’s a tiny,brutalclarity in it now.
We were never going to fix this.
Not really.
If she had stayed, we would’ve kept trying. Kept doing this slow dance of almost and not quite. Kept pretending the crack wasn’t there while both of us bled from it.
She saved us from that.
She saved me from becoming the kind of man who keeps a woman on a leash made of guilt and what ifs.
I plant my hands on my hips and stare at the doorway where she disappeared.
