The offering was never for her. It was never for me.
It’s for the voice in his head that says:you are not amonster, look, you brought flowers, monsters don’t bring flowers.
My fingers tighten their grip on the towel.
I nod once. “Okay.”
The hope in his posture wilts, just slightly. His shoulders drop. His mouth opens, then closes. He was expecting something else.
I don’t know what he wants. I don’t know what script I’m meant to follow.
Thank you. They’re beautiful. You shouldn’t have.
Those are lines for a woman who lives in a world where a husband brings flowers for a reason she understands. Wherea husband brings flowers because he loves her, because he thought of her, because he passed a shop window and something reminded him of her.
I don’t live in that world. I never have.
Julian takes a careful step inside, moving as if I might startle and flee. “I just… want to make things better,” he says, his voice softened with remorse.
That voice.
A cold knot tightens in my stomach.
I knowthisscript. I have memorized every line. Survived every act.
The guilty man brings offerings. The guilty man speaks softly. The guilty man waits for the woman to break, to bend, to say it’s okay, to take him back, to pretend none of it happened. And then, slowly, the offerings stop. The soft voice hardens. And one day, without warning, he reminds you why you should have stayed angry.
I have seen this play before. I have been seated in the front row my whole life.
And yet.
Something is wrong. Something has broken the pattern.
His guilt should have run its course by now. That’s how it always was with my father. Three days. Sometimes four. Once, almost a week—that was the time he bought my mother a coat, the one she had wanted for years. She wore it everywhere. She slept in it some nights. And then, on the sixth day, he backhanded her for burning the toast. The coat hung in the closet for a month before she put it back on.
The pattern never broke. The wheel always turned.
But Julian hasn’t slipped. There’s been no hint of her. No late nights at the office. No guarded phone calls in the driveway. No perfume on his collar, no lipstick on his shirt, no sudden, inexplicable anger that tells me he is tired of pretending.
The longer his consistency holds, the more the warning bell in my chest rings.
Because men like him don’t change.
My father never did.
So why would he?
The knot tightens further. I press my palm flat against my stomach, trying to soothe it. Trying to tell it that this is fine.
I never demanded a single thing from him. I never cried. I never asked for his affection. I never used his infidelity as a weapon.
All I want is to get back the quiet, predictable life we had before. The routine. The stability. The safety of a day I could predict from beginning to end.
So why can’t he just give me that? Why can’t he stop—stop the flowers, stop the soft voice, stop looking at me like I’m a wreckage he needs to fix? Why can’t he see that every time he tries, the ground beneath me shifts a little more?
Every gesture is another thing I cannot predict, another variable I cannot account for, another crack in the only stability I know how to stand on.
If my silence doesn’t push him away—if my stillness, my flatness, myokaysand myfinesand mydon’t worry about its—don’t eventually make him give up. If his guilt doesn’t fade like it’s supposed to, if the effort doesn’t exhaust him, if the old, predictable cycle doesn’t resume and he doesn’t go back to cheating—
