Page 46 of Her Unending Horizon

We hung up.

I stood in the kitchen with the phone still in my hand.

It hit me then, the thing I should’ve seen from the beginning.

Just because I had clawed my way through the dark, just because I had told my therapist and my sisters and myself that I had dragged myself out of the dark… that didn’t mean Zarek had done the same.

What’s more, I had left. I was the one who had put our marriage in danger.

I had packed a suitcase and walked out when he was barely holding himself together, and now I had marched back in with a new determination and a carefully roasted chicken like that evened the score.

And I was such a selfish wench, I expected that, ta-da, you should be on the same page as me.

“How did I not see that?” I whispered to the empty kitchen.

The front door opened.

The sound snapped through the house like a crack.

My heart leapt into my throat. I wiped my hands on a dishtowel, smoothed my dress automatically, and stepped out of the kitchen into the hallway.

He stood just inside the doorway, shoulders slumped, gym bag hanging from his hand like a weight he’d forgotten he was carrying.

He smelled like sweat and chalk and the metallic tang of old adrenaline. His T-shirt was damp. His hair was flattened in the back, like he’d spent time with his head against something—wall, car headrest, didn’t matter.

He saw me.

His eyes flickered—surprise, something like guilt, something like exhaustion, all in one heartbeat.

“Oh,” he said, voice rough. “You’re still here.”

Chapter Ten

When I walked through the door and saw her still standing there, smiling like she’d been waiting for me, I expected… I don’t know. Disappointment? Anger? Something loud enough to drown out the ringing in my own head.

What I didn’t expect was hope.

Real stupid, bright hope lighting up her whole face for one second before my words knocked it out.

“Oh,” I’d said. “You’re still here.”

I watched the hope die in her eyes, clean and fast. Watched her shoulders shift, watched her spine straighten like she was bracing against a blast. The worst part was that I felt a flick in my chest—some awful mix of satisfaction and relief—because pushing her away had become a reflex and I knew how to do that.

Then she smiled again. Not wide, not soft—just enough to let me know she wasn’t going down without a fight.

“Yep,” she said lightly. “Still here. Messing up your house. Burning your dinner.”

She tried to tease it off, like we were still us, and it should’ve worked. It might have, months ago.

“I didn’t ask you to cook for me,” I said, and my voice came out more sullen than I intended.

Her eyebrows went up. Just a fraction.

“I didn’t ask you to behave like an asshole,” she said, perfectly calm. “So I guess we both got something we didn’t want today.”

It hit like a gut jab. Not because she was wrong—because she didn’t yell it. She just laid it out there, clean and measured, and somehow that felt worse.

I set my bag down harder than I needed to and tried again to get her moving toward the door. “Chloe, you should go. This was… I don’t know. It was a mistake. You don’t have to stay here and play nurse or whatever you think you’re doing.”