Kieran’s face surfaces from the dark. He stood between us. Easy. Confident. Uninvited but unbothered. His body occupied the space as if he had always belonged there. He’d called herex-wifewithout a flicker of hesitation. He’d smiled when he said it, his lips curling back as if the word tasted good.
He probably thinks he’s won. Thinks she’s his now.
She’s not his. She’smine. She just forgot for a while. But she’ll remember. When the new life stops feeling new. When the café shifts, and the cheap apartment with peeling wallpaper and secondhand furniture stops feeling like freedom and starts feeling like what it is—a step down. A long, humiliating way down from the life I built for her.
I had given her everything. A house. Money. Afuture.
He can’t give her any of that. What does he have? A job pouring coffee. A rented room somewhere with thin walls and ugly flooring. A smile that probably works on women who don’t know better.
But Nora knows better. She lived better. She slept in soft sheets and ate food she didn’t have to worry about paying for. She’ll get tired of scraping by. Of counting coins. Of coming home to a place that isn’t hers.
She’ll come back.
She has nowhere else to go.
My stomach grumbles, so I push off the bed and head to the kitchen. I hired a housekeeper months ago, but I told her to take today off. I just couldn’t tolerate the idea of another person breathing the air in this house. Not today.
I open the refrigerator again, as if something might have changed in the last ten minutes, as if a labeled container might have materialized on the shelf where her care used to live.
There is nothing.
I make dinner. Or I try.
The knife is too dull, or maybe it’s my grip. The cutting board slides against the counter. I chop the garlic too fast, too careless, the pieces are a mess—uneven, jagged, some minced into a bitter paste, others still nearly whole, and a few simply crushed into flat, weeping discs under the side of the blade. I don’t know how she did it. I watched her a thousand times. Absent-mindedly. Like one watches the television. Her knife moved like it was part of her hand, quick and sure and quiet. I never asked her to teach me. I never thought I would need to know.
I burn the garlic. The oil is too hot. I didn’t wait long enough, or I waited too long—I don’t know the difference. The garlic turns brown, then black, curling at the edges. The pan smokes.The smell is acrid, and I curse under my breath and scrape the whole thing into the trash.
The trash is full. She used to take it out. Every Tuesday, I think. Or Wednesday. I never paid attention. It was just a part of the house’s invisible duties, a task that performed itself while I was sleeping or working or thinking about more important things.
I munch on a piece of bread while standing at the counter.
The bread is dry. It tastes like nothing. I chew and swallow and chew and swallow, and I don’t sit down because there is no point. The table is set for one. The chair across from me is empty. The plate that would have been hers is still in the cabinet, stacked with the others, untouched.
I leave the plate in the sink.
She used to wash my dishes. Every night, after I went to bed, she would stand at the sink and clean up after me.
Now the plate sits there. And no one is coming to wash it.
I go to bed. The sheets are cold. Her pillow is still there, on her side, untouched. I don’t move it.
She’s broken. That’s the only explanation. The only conclusion a sane mind can reach. Something is wrong with her. Has been for a long time. Maybe since before we met. Maybe that’s why she was so quiet, so distant, so impossible to reach.
I tried. I really tried. I asked about her day. I bought her flowers. I apologized for the affair—more times than she deserved.
And she still left.
So the problem must be her. Not me. Her.
I close my eyes. Sleep doesn’t come. The silence presses against my ears, heavy and insistent.
She’ll regret this. One day, she’ll wake up and realize what she threw away. The house. The security. The man who loved her, who actually saw her when she was nothing and carvedout a space for her in a world she wasn’t built for. I provided everything. Everything she ever needed. I was the floor, the walls, and the roof. And I won’t be there.
I’ll have moved on. I’ll have found someone better. Someone who appreciates me. Someone who isn’t broken.
I hate her for leaving. I hate her for making me feel like this. I hate her for being the one to walk away when I should have been the one to let her go.
She didn’t win. She didn’t win anything.
