It softens. Luminous and warm.
Warm like morning light. Warm like safety itself.
I find myself smiling back.
Just a little. Just enough.
And then I face Julian again.
He isn’t looking at me. He’sglaringat Kieran.
His jaw is clenched so tight a muscle ticks in his cheek. The tick is rapid, furious, the tick of a man who is trying very hard to control himself and failing.
He doesn’t see my smile. He doesn’t see Maeve’s warmth. He only sees the man who has sat down beside his wife, and his imagination is filling in the rest.
I fold my hands in my lap. I press my palms flat against each other. I feel the bones of my fingers, the warmth of my own skin. I breathe in once, slowly, and then I lift my head and meet his eyes.
“You don’t have to worry about what I say about my father,” I tell him. “It’s my life. He was my father—”
“You’remywife,” Julian cuts in, his voice sharp, possessive. A reminder of where I belong. What I’m supposed to be. That he still sees me as something he owns.
I don’t look away.
“I won’t be for long.”
His entire face tightens. A flash of pain goes through his eyes but it’s quickly swallowed by a darker, angrier look. “So that’s it then?” he breathes. “You’re just giving up? You actually want to throw everything away like this?” His voice drops, intimate and aggrieved, as if we are the only two people in the room. “What happened to you? The woman I married doesn’t quit. She doesn’t walk away.” He searches my face for the woman he remembers, the one who stayed, the one who endured. And I watch him not find her.
The woman he married never existed. She was a performance. A survival mechanism. A woman who made herself small so that he could feel large.
His face stills, a thought locking into place. “No. I see it now.Idid this to you. I broke you. The cheating did this to you.” He swallows hard, his eyes glisten. “But Nora, think about what wehad. You love me—I know you do. You can’t just walk away from our marriage like this.”
The words are strange. They are not a question. They are a command. He is telling me to remember something that never existed.
My brow furrows.
“Love?” I ask, the confusion in my voice utterly genuine. “When did I ever say I loved you?”
The question hangs in the air silencing everything else.
Julian blinks. Confusion flickers across his face, as if I have said something that cannot be true. His eyes go distant for a second, scrolling backward through years of mornings and dinners looking for the moment, the proof, the evidence that I once said those words.
His brow furrows. His lips part, but nothing comes out.
He will not find it. Because it never happened.
I never said I loved him. The words never passed my lips because they never lived in my chest. Love had nowhere to go in my childhood home, no place to rest in my marriage, no role to play in the quiet, desperate act of survival.
Julian never said it either. The only time those words ever left his mouth was in the frantic, desperate hour after I caught him. He stood in our kitchen, trembling, and saidI love youin a voice I had never heard before.
But people say anything when they want to get out of trouble. They grab whatever words might work. They don’t reach for the truth. They reach for what might save them.
He didn’t mean it.
Julian’s face twists. Insult and disbelief knot together in his expression. “What are you talking about?” he demands, his voice tight. “You love me. You’ve always loved me.”
He is so certain of my feelings, so certain of his version of our marriage, that the thought of contradiction never even touches him.
I shake my head.
