The thought claws through me, half plea, half panic. Why isn’t she throwing something—tearing this room down to the studs, cursing my name until these walls have no choice but to remember it? Why isn’t she making me feel the size of what I’ve done?
Why isn’t she making this loud, making this a fight, giving me something to brace against?
Why won’t she look at me?
She’s in shock, I tell myself, desperate for anything solid.That’s all.No one goes through this kind of wreckage without falling apart. No one is this calm when their life breaks open.
“Nora, please.” My voice cracks down the middle. “Just let me explain.”
A long moment passes.
Slowly, she raises her head.
Her eyes find mine.
And there is nothing there.
No anger. No hurt cresting behind her eyes, no shadow of betrayal waiting to break the surface. None of the things I told myself I’d face someday. None of the reckoning I half-believed I deserved.
Just absence. A vast emptiness where my wife used to be.
“I’m sorry for interrupting,” she says, her voice perfectly, frighteningly level. “You forgot your lunch. I thought I’d bring it. I did knock. I called, too. No one answered, so I let myself in.” A brief pause. “I should have knocked harder.”
“Don’t.” The word comes out broken. “Don’t you dare apologize. Nora—please—”
But she is already turning away.
She doesn’t run. She doesn’t slam the door. She simply turns and walks. Each step is measured, unhurried, like someone who has just finished a meeting and has somewhere else to be. Her shoulders don’t shake. Her hands don’t reach for the wall. She doesn’t look at me or at the woman still breathing behind me.
She looks at nothing.
She simply leaves.
That, more than anything, undoes me.
This is wrong. All of it, wrong. This isn’t grief. This isn’t fury. This is worse—a ghost wearing her face, moving through the room with a calm so complete it has its own sound, its own weight.
I stand frozen.
My mind refuses the scene. Keeps offering it back, unprocessed. I had braced myself for the storm—her voice, her tears, something I can reach into and grab hold of, something I can fight. But she gave me nothing, and the absence of it knocks the ground clean out from under me.
Then a primal instinct snaps the paralysis and I lunge after her.
The elevator lobby is empty, doors sealed shut. I take the stairs two at a time, my shoulder catching the wall on the landing, the sound of my own footsteps too loud in the concrete stairwell. I crash through the parking lot door just in time to catch her taillights flaring red at the exit. I fumble the keys. Drop them. Snatch them off the asphalt.
By the time I get my keys into the ignition, my hands are shaking. I pull out after her. One lane back. Clinging to the only thought I have left: that she’s going home. That she hasn’t already made a decision I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to undo.
That I haven’t just destroyed the best thing I ever had and left it bleeding into the carpet of my office floor.
Chapter Two: Julian
The drive home is a blackout.
Red lights I don’t stop for. Turns I don’t remember making. The engine screaming under my foot, my hands locked on the wheel, knuckles drained of colour, acid climbing my throat. The violent, deafening hammering in my chest that won’t slow, won’t stop, won’t let me think past the single, terrible image seared behind my eyes.
Nora. In that doorway.
Then the thoughts, louder than the engine, louder than everything:
