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“So, this is weird, right?” she says.

“Honestly, yes, and I’m kind of expecting you to bolt,” I admit.

“I can always call a taxi for when I want to go. Why don’t we sit and talk, get everything off our chests?” she suggests.

I cross the room and sit down next to her. There’s a beat of silence between us.

“I’m sorry,” I blurt out.

“What are you sorry for?” Her eyebrow is slightly raised.

“You want me to spell it out?”

“I think it would be better if you did.” She shrugs and then takes a small sip of her wine. There’s a flicker of appreciation across her face, so I’m sure she likes her choice.

I put my glass on the floor, then shift on the sofa and shuffle a little closer towards her. Her breath hitches and she ducks, putting her own wineglass on the floor before looking at me.

“I’m sorry about Hannah.”

“Joseph—” she starts, but I shake my head to cut her off.

“It was shitty. It’s the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever done.”

“It really hurt me,” she whispers.

“I know.”

“No, I don’t think you do. I was eighteen and totally in love with you. I believed every single word you said to me, right up to the point when you wrote me a letter to tell me you were getting married to somebody else and shattered everything I thought to be true. That’s really messed up, you know that, right?”

“I do.” I nod and then hang my head in shame because she’s right. What I did to her was the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life. I blindsided her. I promised her the world. I promised I’d never hurt her, vowed so many times that she could trust me, and then I walked away and never returned.

“For years, I went over those months with you, and I searched for anything that I ignored. Did I just overlook the clues that you had a fiancée? A fiancée, Joseph. You basically made me a mistress,” she states, and her voice is a little more rushed.

“I know there isn’t anything I can say that will justify what I did, but it wasn’t like that.”

“What, you weren’t somebody taking advantage of a vulnerable teenage girl, getting your bit on the side while your future wife was on a year overseas?” she scoffs.

I feel the heat on my cheeks and the shame in my stomach. There’s no way of glossing over the facts to make me sound any less like an asshole.

“Hannah and I weren’t in love. It was obligation. It was—”

“It was a relationship I didn’t know a thing about, no matter how you want to badge it up. It doesn’t matter whether you loved her or not. What matters is that you didn’t respect her enough to be faithful or stick to whatever agreement you made with her. And what matters is that you didn’t care enough about me to tell me the truth before it was too late,” she reasons.

“At what point should I have told you? When we first started talking? You want me to go back to that point and say, ‘Hey, Dee, I know it’ll sound weird because all we really are to each other is friends, but I have a fiancée I’m supposed to marry, even though we don’t love each other. She’s from a traditional family, and our relationship has always been fake, just to keep her safe.’ What would you have said?” I ask.

“I don’t know, but it would have been nice to know. Even if not then, but later. You should have told me before the first night I got into bed with you.”

I fall silent again, but I know she’s right. I know it’ll make no difference if I told her that I was so blinded by my feelings towards her that my connection and commitment to Hannah wasn’t even a tiny pinprick in my mind. You can’t tell a woman you were desperately in love with them—to the point you didn’t see reason—if it meant screwing over another woman in the process.

Except I had been blinded by my feelings for Delilah. And I let those feelings guide me to make decisions I knew in my heart were right but knew in my bones had repercussions. I was her teacher—even if nothing sexual happened between us until she finished school. I was older—even if it was only by four years and she was already eighteen. I made vows to uphold my ethics and be a professional person. Except ethics mean nothing when put on a weighed mythical scale and measured against the matters of the heart.

The heart always wins.

She should have always won, no matter the item placed on the other side of the scale. Until the price was something I never contemplated. When the price of staying with her would have meant damaging her.

Until that point, everything I felt for her was enough to convince me that what we were doing was okay, that the choices I made were okay. It was okay to go back on the expectations of my family. It was okay to go back on the promise I made to Hannah—even if I knew it would impact her life. It was okay to do something I never considered before—to contemplate walking away from my life and my commitments to have a life with Delilah.

I would have done it. I would have walked away from everything. Screw the consequences. Screw the repercussions and the judgements and the inevitable dishonour from my family for breaking an engagement to the person they considered to be their daughter-in-law already. I would have held Delilah’s hand and vowed that the two of us could battle through anything the world could possibly throw at us.