I have stopped leaving the apartment.
Running into someone I used to work with is worse than solitude. They see me, hesitate, then fix their eyes on their phone as if it holds the secrets to the universe.
I eat whatever requires the least effort. Cereal from the box. Unbuttered toast. Sandwiches I don’t bother to sit down for.
I sleep in fragments. I wake reaching for a phone that never buzzes—no messages, no reminders, not even spam. The screen stays black.
Even my mother stops calling. The one time she answered, her voice sounded soft and teary. “We’re ashamed,” she said. “You’ve embarrassed us. Your father doesn’t dare show his face anywhere.” She never asked how I was. She didn’t ask if I was eating. She hung up.
She spoke about my fall from grace the way I think about it, as if it were a stain on a favourite rug. Unsightly. Unwilling to come out no matter how hard one scrubs.
She still transfers money into my account every few months. But she no longer gives me her time. Her attention. Her presence. Just the money.
I think about Nora more than I want to.
The version who lived in my house, the one who moved through rooms without sound, who made my breakfast and ironed my shirts and waited for me to come home; she is a thing of the past. A flat image in an old dusty frame. But the woman outside the courthouse, standing beside Maeve—she haunts me.
Relaxed.
Warm.
Happy.
Five years I had her. All her attention, all her care. I never once pulled that laugh from her. That smile follows me through every empty room, every silent dinner, every night I lie awake staring at the ceiling. She built something after me. Something she prefers. And the worst part—the part that coils in my chest and won’t loosen—is that the best version of her appeared the moment I lost her. She is a girl who has successfully shed her skin. And I seem to be the discarded husk she left behind.
Months blur. Winter melts into spring. Spring burns into summer. The seasons change with a cruel apathy, utterly unbothered by my grief or my shame or my slow, damp surrender to this life.
I left the house. Even with my parents’ money, I couldn’t stay there. I moved to a small apartment. Then to a smaller one.
What hurts worst isn’t the lost status or the empty bank account or my name turned into a fine, bitter charcoal in the mouths of everyone I once knew.
It’s that nobody comes.
Nobody fights for me. Nobody whispers that I was framed. Nobody remembers the man I used to be. Someone who once wore crisp shirts and Italian cologne, was fawned over by people who wore crisp shirts and Italian cologne, and had a future that looked like a straight line.
I wait for a call that never comes. A knock that never sounds. A hand reaching through the wreckage.
Nothing.
I sit alone in my shrinking rooms and come to a lonely understanding: there is no rescue coming.
Somewhere out there, in the bright, indifferent world, she breathes air I will never share. She laughs at jokes I will never hear. She falls asleep in a room where my name isn’t even uttered. She is whole, and she is elsewhere.
That life—her life—moves forward without me.
I thought the court would punish me. Or the company. Or my father’s silence.
But the real punishment is simpler.
She is happy.
And her happiness has nothing to do with me.
No lawyer can argue that away. No judge can reduce that sentence. No appeal can overturn this verdict.
She left. She stayed gone. She became someone I will never know.
And I am here.
