Then what comes next?
The day his trying becomes exhaustion, and his exhaustion turns to venom. The story that begins to form:I did everything I could and she still wouldn’t forgive me.I tried.I really tried.But she wouldn’t let me in.She wouldn’t let me fix it.This is her fault too. The version of events that will feel true to him. That will become true to him.
He has never hurt me physically. He has never even raised his voice.
But he had never betrayed me before, either.
And then he did.
If he was capable of breaking one vow, what stops him from breaking all the others? What stops his frustration from becoming a shove? What stops his resentment from becoming a slap? What stops his anger from becoming violence I have to pick myself up off the floor from?
The paper wrapping crinkles. “I’m trying,” he whispers, the words raw, scraped clean of everything except the truth he believes he is telling. “I’m trying so hard.”
Why? Why are you still trying? What do you want from me? What do you need from me? What happens when you finally get tired of it?
I am an expert in patterns. I know the rhythm of a man’s footsteps when he is about to get angry. I know the set of shoulders before a hand is raised. I know the particular quality of silence that means the room is about to change.
I know Julian’s tells too—the tightness in his jaw when he’s annoyed but won’t admit it, the sudden stillness before he drops a barb he knows will land badly, the sharp exhale through his nose when I’ve let him down and he’s chosen not to mention it.
I have built my life on reading these patterns.
But this version of him—this unfamiliar, persistent version—
I don’t have a pattern for this.
And the one thing I cannot survive is the thing I cannot predict.
Chapter Six: Nora
Idon’t know how I ended up outside the café.
The walk here is a blank. I remember leaving the house. I remember standing in the grocery aisle staring at cucumbers until they blurred into meaningless green shapes. And then somehow I was here, on this pavement, in front of this glass.
It wasn’t planned.
I haven’t let myself plan in a long time.
Planning requires hope. Hope invites the promise of something better. And a promise is just a future disappointment, waiting to happen.
So I stopped. Years ago, I stopped looking ahead. Stopped imagining. Stopped letting myself want things.
I live the way I was taught. Quietly. Carefully. With as little room for uncertainty as possible. I keep my world small. I keep my voice smaller. Each day a copy of the day before—that was the safest life I knew how to build.
But these past few months, Julian has shattered that quiet.
He has flooded my life with uncertainty. Every morning I wake up and I don’t know what he will do. Whether he’ll look at me with those soft, searching eyes or finally look away.
Will he keep trying or will he stop?
I don’t know how to exist inside this new reality.
He isn’t hurting me. He isn’t hitting me. He isn’t locking me out. He isn’t screaming in my face or throwing pots across thekitchen or calling me names that live in my head long after the shouting stops.
But his unpredictability is a different kind of violence. It’s the violence of a constant, silent alarm I cannot turn off. The violence of a ceiling fan that might fall at any moment. The violence of a floor that looks solid but gives way beneath your feet the second you stop holding your breath.
My father’s cycle always ended in violence.
I don’t know where Julian’s ends.
