Iwake the moment he moves.
It isn’t the shift of the mattress or the quiet rustle of sheets that pulls me from under the surface of sleep, but something deeper, something instinctive, like my body has learned the shape of him so completely that even the suggestion of his absence feels like loss.
My eyes open slowly, the room still dim with early morning light, and I watch him as he starts to leave the bed, his back to me, his shoulders tense.
I feel embarrassed. Ashamed.
I was frantic last night. Caught like a fly in a web of deceit.
The memory presses in at the edges of my mind, jagged and uncomfortable, and I feel it begin. That familiar slipping. The quiet unraveling that starts somewhere deep in my chest and spreads outward, thread by fragile thread.
Will he look at me differently?
Will he hate me, now he knows I am broken soul-deep?
Will… will he leave me?
Trey pauses.
Then he looks back.
It’s subtle, like he felt me watching him, like some invisible tether between us tightened just enough to pull his attention, and his eyes find mine.
He doesn’t speak.
He just looks.
There’s something in the way he watches, something searching, something almost desperate, like he’s trying to read what’s written across my face before I can hide it.
My breath catches as I hold his gaze, my thoughts turning sharp and cruel in the quiet space between us, because I can’t help but wonder what he sees when he looks at me like that.
Does he see the cracks I can’t quite hold together anymore, the way I’m barely balancing on the edge of something I don’t think I can survive again?
Or worse…
Is it regret?
A slow, aching pressure builds in my chest as the thought takes root, insidious and impossible to ignore, curling through me like a whispered prayer turned wrong.
Did he bind himself to me only to realize I truly am just a burden?
He married what he thought was a woman, but instead I am simply a husk. A corpse. Empty.
We stood witnessed, bound in rushed matrimony… and he died because of me. Hurt because of my selfish actions.
My father was right… Gideon was right…
The air feels thinner the longer I lie there, my fingers curling into the sheets as the weight of it presses down, as the darkness starts to creep in at the edges of my vision, pulling me under, dragging me somewhere I don’t want to go.
I feel it happening.
The slipping.
The losing.
My breathing becomes unsteady. I feel less like something living and more like something already condemned…Marked.Unclean.A soul bound for judgment.Is that how he sees me now? As something already lost.
Of course he does. He sees everything.Just as I begin to fall, the mattress shifts.
