When the call ended, I sat there for a long time, engine idling, my forehead pressed against the steering wheel. It felt like signing my own death certificate.
It rolled into fragments that gutted me. Chopping onions for pasta I didn’t want to eat. The sting hitting my eyes, sharp and burning—the perfect excuse. Because the truth was that I was already crying.
Adrian at the table, scrolling through his phone, thumb moving in lazy, detached circles. The glow from the screen turned his face pale blue, his expression unreadable.
No music. No laughter. No heat between us. Just the soft clatter of the knife against the cutting board and the low hum of the fridge, as if we weren’t in the same room.
Cruelly, time reminded me of when we couldn’t keep ourhands off each other in the kitchen. Fingers brushing, hips bumping, wine spilled and licked from skin. Adrian pulled me close just to taste the sauce from my spoon. Burning dinner because we were too busy kissing.
And then a sharp cut back to him not even looking up when I set his plate down. Not noticing when I wiped at my eyes and smiled through it.
The quiet final note of something that once sang like a symphony.
The scene closed on me sitting alone at the table, staring at the silver band on my finger, dull from time, but still solid, still there. Wondering if love could corrode. If it rusted the way metal did—slow, silent, and irreversible.
The reel stuttered,as if the film was catching on something sharp. I could see the flicker of better moments—sunlight on water, sitting on the porch at sunset, Adrian’s sleepy smile—but the frame wouldn’t hold. It jittered, blurred, and then snapped back tothis.
Tohim.
To the version of us I didn’t want to remember.
“Not this one,” I whispered. “Please—skip it.”
I wanted to scream at the reel to move, topleasejust move, to give me the ocean, or the laughter, or the way he used to pull me close and murmurmineagainst my skin.
But it wouldn’t.
It held me here, in the stillness of a kitchen that had forgotten joy, watching a love that had already started to rot.
The email was still open when he sat down at my desk, some late night when we’d been pretending everything was fine. I came out of the shower to find him there, shirtless, his hair damp, my laptop screen glowing against his face.
For a moment, he didn’t say anything. Didn’t look at me. Just stared at the words.
Then, quietly, he asked, “You were going to leave me?”
My throat closed around air. I tried to speak, to explain that I hadn’t filed anything, that I didn’t want to hurt him, but the damage was already done.
Something fractured between us. Adrian begged me to wait. Not to act.
“Just think about it,” he said, voice breaking in a way I hadn’t heard in years. “Please, Eli. Don’t give up on us yet.”
The next flicker was almost like a honeymoon, or an imitation of one. Adrian coming home on time, leaving his phone in another room, and kissing me like he remembered how.
Making dinner together again. Sleeping tangled up like we used to, skin to skin, promises whispered against my shoulder. Fleeting seconds of perfection where I believed we might claw our way back to normal.
But the thing about pretending is that it burns fast. The moments felt forced, too fragile to hold. We smiled too hard. Laughed too loud. Tried too much. And when the quiet crept back in, it was heavier than before.
I stopped talking.
He stopped noticing.
The papers stayed in a folder in the drawer, untouched but still there, a loaded gun neither of us would admit existed.
And I… I just went numb, drowning in the silence that had become our language.
A string of wonderful memories danced across my vision, glowing brightly.
The trip to California for my sister’s wedding, the taste of salt and rum drinks and cut fruit, our feet buried in the sand. Adrian’s hand in mine as we watched the waves roll in, his smile easy, unburdened.
