I nod and move toward the nearest table, the mop still clutched firmly in my other hand. I lower myself into the chair and rest the mop against my leg.
He sits directly opposite me, leaning in, elbows braced on his knees as if he’s trying to pin me in place with his gaze alone.
Maeve and Kieran position themselves behind me, close enough to form a barrier between me and the life I left.
Julian’s eyes move to Maeve and Kieran, then return to me. His jaw tightens. The audience unsettles him. The witnesses unsettle him. He wants me alone again. He wants the woman who had no one.
But I have people around me now.
I speak before he can start. “How did you find me?”
His gaze slides away for a fraction of a second. Then returns. A single beat of hesitation.
That hesitation tells me everything. He is deciding how much to tell me. How much to reveal. How much to conceal behind the carefully constructed mask of the reasonable man. “I… hired a private investigator.”
My hands tighten in my lap. A cold, sickening dread trickles down my spine.
“You hired a private investigator to track me down?” My voice is barely a breath.
His jaw hardens. The softness in his face hardens too.
“You left me with no other option, Nora.” His voice pitches with an urgency that is meant to sound reasonable, desperate, the voice of a man who has been wronged and is simply trying to make things right. “You just vanished. You didn’t give me any warning, any chance to fix things. I had to find you.”
No.
No, he didn’t.
He could have signed the papers. He could have accepted my choice. He could have let me have my freedom.
He didn’t have to hunt me.
Hechoseto.
He leans in, his voice dropping into a tone that’s meant to be reasoning but feels like a trap. “I know you’re hurting. I hate myself for causing it. But leaving like that? That wasn’t fair. That wasn’t right.” His tone shifts, taking on a patronizing, corrective edge. “You should have come to me. We could have fixed this. You don’t just run away when things get difficult, Nora. That’s not how a marriage works.”
A sharp scoff cuts through the air.
Maeve.
The sound is quick. Uncontrolled.
Julian’s head whips toward her, his eyes burning with a flash of fury before he forcibly drags his focus back to me.
“I’m here, Nora,” he says, his voice a tender, urgent whisper, as if he’s making a grand romantic vow. “I’m not leaving. I’m yours. Only yours. I’ll never make that mistake again. Come home. We’ll start over.” His gaze intensifies. “We will never be apart now.”
Never be apart.
It doesn’t sound like a promise.
It sounds like a sentence.
A life sentence. A prison without walls. A future in which I am forever bound to a man who hired a private investigator to track me down, who stood in my café and looked at my mop with disdain, who is sitting across from me now, telling me that I will never be free.
I don’t understand this desperate, clinging need. I don’t understand why my freedom feels like his loss. I don’t understand why he can’t just let me go.
All I feel is a cold, sinking dread. A familiar dread.
The oldest dread I know.
