The paper is warm. Or maybe that is my imagination. Maybe my hands are so cold that anything they touch feels warm.
Two sentences.
That’s all she left.
Two sentences that tear my life in two.
My throat closes. My heartbeat stutters, then slams painfully against my ribs. A wound rips open in my chest, and through the gap comes a sound I didn’t know I could make. “No.”
I read it again.
And again.
I stare at the loops of the letters until they become meaningless black smudges on a yellow field. The paper blurs and sharpens, blurs and sharpens. My eyes are wet. I didn’t notice when that happened. I don’t remember crying. But there are tears on my cheeks, warm and salt, and I don’t wipe themaway because wiping them away will mean accepting that they are there.
I let them roll down my face.
The letters don’t change.
She’s gone.
She actually left.
“Nora?” Her name shatters against my teeth. Dry and chalky.
I clear my throat and try again, louder, firmer, the authoritative call of a husband summoning his wife.
“Nora.”
Silence answers.
My gaze drops to the space beside the note. Her phone. And beside it—
Her wedding ring.
The world tilts, the edges of my vision dissolving into a blur.
The ring is the thing that finishes me.
A tiny yet heavy lead weight dropped into the center of the room.
“No—no, no, no—” My hands tremble so badly the note flutters. The paper slips between my fingers and drifts toward the floor. I grab for it, miss, grab again, and crush it in my fist. “Nora!”
I don’t even recognize the guttural scream that tears from my throat. It sounds like an animal being slaughtered in a distant room. It is raw, unpracticed and absolutelyrepulsive.
I grip the edge of the desk, the wood biting into my palms, my knuckles bleaching of all colour, until they look like polished bone. The edge is sharp. The pain is real. I hold onto it, because this stinging pain is the only thing keeping me from falling apart.
She left the phone.
She left me.
She left the ring.
She does not want to be my wife anymore.
How long had she been planning this?
I see it in my head. Her blank small face as a mask of compliance while her brain performs the cold calculation of her leaving me. Was she just waiting for me to let my guard down? Was there ever a part of her that considered giving me a chance? Did she spend these last months secretly despising me?
