“Yes.”
“You had an episode,” he continues. “Before the wedding, during the lead-up, I could see it happening—”
“Don’t you dare.”
“It’s not your fault, Piper. If you’d talked to the psychiatrist—”
“I said don’t.”
“I’m trying to help you—”
“Stop! Jesus Christ, just shut the fuck up for one minute.”
I look at him properly, maybe for the first time in years. I’m not seeing through the lens of who I was trying to be for him. I’m just looking directly at him with the eyes I’ve been cleaning out over the last two weeks.
“You’ve been telling me who I am for three years.”
“Piper—”
“Shut up. I’m talking.”
Something flashes across his face. Probably shock that I said it, that I mean it, and that I’m not adjusting.
Surprisingly, he closes his mouth.
“You told me I was too much,” I say. “And then too little. You told me my moods were a problem, and my clothes werea problem, and my music was too loud. You made me go to a psychiatrist and tell them I might be like my mother. Do you have any idea what it took for me to say those words?”
“I was concerned.”
“You were strategic. You found the thing that would make me doubt myself the most, and you used it. And I let you. I let you because I thought that’s what love required, that I make myself smaller and quieter and easier to manage. That’s not love, Ezra. I know that now.”
“He’s been putting these ideas in your head.”
“Nobody put anything in my head. I found them there, where they’ve been the whole time.”
He steps toward me. “You’re not leaving. We’re not done.”
“I’mdone. I ended it on the phone, but I’m ending it now, in person, because I think you deserve that even though I’m not sure you’d have given me the same.”
His hand grips my arm. It isn’t tight. That’s what I always told myself. He was never rough with me, never raised his hand. It was just a hold.
But something shifts in that grip. I look at his hand on my arm, and I feel what the ring would have represented. I imagine what it would have looked like five years from now. I see the slow fade, the music softening, me becoming quieter. I see the day coming when I couldn’t remember what I sounded like when I still took up space.
“Take your hand off me.”
He doesn’t move.
“Ezra. Take. Your hand. Off me.”
He lets go and stumbles back.
And we just… stare at each other.
I once loved him. I did. I loved the man who concealed the version he’s become.
It’s jarring, the lack of feeling I have toward him now, considering I was in a wedding dress two weeks ago.
“I want you to leave,” I tell him.
