Slow.
Once.
“No.” I let the word sit. Then: “I don’t.”
He lets out a sharp, irritated breath through his nose. “Nora, you’re confusing yourself. You love me. I’m your husband.”
“Yes,” I whisper. “You are. But I don’t love you. I never loved you.”
His eyes widen, a slow-dawning horror filling them.
“And your cheating didn’t break me,” I add.
I didn’t break. I walked away before I could see what came after the guilt faded. Whether the anger would rise. Whether a raised hand would ever fall.
I wouldn’t survive that again. I barely survived it the first time.
Julian’s expression softens into pity. He shakes his head as if I’m too lost to see my own truth. “After you found out, you shut down. Pulled away. Stopped living. You went quiet.” His voice drops, heavy with false tenderness. “I know how much I hurt you. You don’t have to lie about it.”
He is accusing me of dishonesty, of rewriting history, of pretending to be someone I am not.
“Julian, I was always like that. Iamquiet.”
He shakes his head. “But we still talked. We still lived. And then you just… you stopped.”
“No,” my brows draw together. “The only thing that stopped was my opinion. Before, when you’d talk about your day and ask what I thought, I’d answer. After I found out, I stopped answering. I just listened. Everything else—the cooking, the cleaning, the silence—stayed exactly the same.”
Julian blinks, and a strange stillness settles over him. “Nora… something’s wrong.” His voice drops into a soft, concerned murmur—a performance of care that fools no one. “Listen to yourself. First your father, now this. I’m worried about you. You’re not yourself. Let me get you some help.”
His words enter my chest and freeze there.
A chill radiates from my ribs outward. It reaches my throat. It presses against the soft tissue behind my eyes. He has done this before. Again and again. My truth bends until it fits the shape of his comfort.
I am the confused one.
I am the liar.
I am not leaving him—I am losing my mind.
I turn over every memory. Every argument. Every quiet disagreement. Every moment I offered a different view, a different feeling, a different want. A pattern emerges, undeniable and cold.
Each time, Julian met my difference with the same response:
Nora, you don’t understand.
Nora, that’s not how it is.
Nora, you’re mistaken.
It was always me.
Never him.
Kieran’s voice cuts through the air, slicing my thoughts in half. “Stop talking to her like that.”
I’ve never heard him sound like this. At the café, he jokes with customers. He drops milk jugs. He laughs at his own mistakes. That Kieran has a soft voice and an easy shrug.
This Kieran has teeth.
