Chapter 27 The breakup
The breakup
The truth is I wanted to believe tonight could fix everything.
We’d been off for a while, sure, but I told myself it was just a phase, that couples go through ups and downs.
If we could make it back here—to the restaurant where it all began—maybe we’d remember who we were in the beginning.
Maybe we could find our way back to that version of us.
The server approached our table with a practiced smile. “Ready to order?” he asked.
“We’ll take a bottle of the pinot noir,” Cole said without looking at me, “an order of edamame, one crunchy shrimp roll, one spicy tuna roll, and a rainbow roll.”
He handed the menus back and, before I could say a word, immediately picked up his phone, his thumb already scrolling. I stared at the screen reflecting in his eyes, feeling a strange chill settle between us.
“How was work?” I asked, the words sounding dull, like they couldn’t break through the tension.
Cole locked his phone and set it face down on the table with a sigh. “Same old, same old. You? How’s preparing for pub day and the book tour going?”
“I’m as ready as I can be I guess,” I said with a shrug, but my words felt empty. The release was the last thing on my mind right now. I tried to hold his gaze, to ground us both in this moment, but his eyes flickered down to his phone again.
I should’ve known right then. That tiny shift of his attention, that instinct to check out instead of lean in. It wasn’t just a bad night. The beginning of the end had been in motion for a while now. This was just the end.
The server returned with the wine, and as he poured, Cole’s attention drifted to his screen once more, like he wanted to be anywhere but here.
The parallel of this moment hit me like a brick.
The memory of our first date clashed with the present.
That night I couldn’t get enough of his attention, but right now I felt invisible.
“Your food will be right out,” the server said before disappearing into the sea of tables.
I watched him leave and then turned to Cole with a frustrated look. “So are you going to spend the entire night on your phone or…”
He looked up and set the phone aside. “Sorry, it was the pickleball group chat.”
“You text them a lot,” I pointed out.
“I see them every other day. We text about courts and times. We kind of have to communicate those kinds of things,” he replied.
“No need to get defensive. It was just an observation. I’m glad you have a hobby you seem to love. I was just giving you shit,” I tried to joke.
Cole pursed his lips and nodded his head, saying everything without saying anything.
“What’s up with you tonight?” I asked.
He looked at me then—really looked at me—and I felt it coming before he even opened his mouth.
“I met someone else,” he said so surely.
The words didn’t register at first. They hung between us, waiting to be heard.
“You—what? When?” I couldn’t even manage to form full sentences.
A strange buzzing filled my ears. The restaurant around us blurred—plates clinking, people laughing, someone dropping chopsticks two tables over. But all I could see was him. Cole. The person I’d spent years building a life with was telling me, over wine and sushi, that he had met someone else.
“She’s in the pickleball league,” he added, like that clarified anything. “It started as a group thing. We’d get lunch or coffee or a beer after games, and then it trickled down to just us.”
My stomach turned, but I held my ground. Sitting up straighter, I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing me break. At least not yet.
“So that’s why you’re so obsessed with pickleball? And your phone? It makes so much sense.”
“It’s not like that,” he said quickly.
“Did you cheat on me?”
He shook his head. “No. I’d never.”
And the worst part is that I believed him. I believed that he hadn’t touched her, not yet. But he had felt something, and it was enough to sit here across from me and say it out loud. Enough to make me feel like I’d already lost him.
I can still feel that exact moment. The way my stomach bottomed out, how I kept waiting for him to take it back, to say he didn’t mean it, but he never did. He just kept talking, like he was narrating the unraveling of us.
“It’s not like that. I don’t even know how she feels about me. I just know that I like her, and if I can like her, what is that supposed to mean for us? I know we’ve been trying to make this work, but I think it’s clear that it hasn’t been.”
I took a sip of water just to have something to do with my hands, but it felt like swallowing glass. “Because you’ve been putting more time and energy into pickleball than us,” I attested.
“The same could be said about you and writing,” he countered.
“That’s not fair. Writing is my job.”
“Ainsley, I’m sorry. I didn’t plan for this to happen. I wanted us to work, but we both know it’s been obvious that we aren’t going to. We deserve to be with people who make us happy, and I hate that I had to meet someone else to realize that, but it’s what’s best for both of us.”
I started to get angry. “You don’t know what’s best for me. Why would you take me to this restaurant to drop a bomb like this on me? Because public humiliation is what’s best for me?”
I could see the server in my peripheral vision, heading toward our table and then quickly diverting his path to avoid what was gearing up to be a car crash. You and me both, buddy.
“I call bullshit, Cole. You met someone new and shiny that makes you feel great? Great. That’s so great for you! But don’t say that’s what’s best for me, because it’s not. It’s what’s best for you. Just get the check and take me home. I can’t even look at you.”
I stared at the soy sauce dish, wondering if this was what it felt like to watch a life unravel in real time.
It’s tragic really, how one day a relationship can be the best thing to ever happen to you, and the next you’re watching it burn to the ground where it eventually just becomes a pile of ashes.
No matter how long or how hard you try to sweep them up and rebuild it, you just can’t.
Love doesn’t work like that. I’d known we were on fire for a while, but it was a slow burn in the absolute worst way.
* * *
When we got back to my apartment, Cole moved through it quickly, collecting anything that was his—an old PlayStation, a handful of boxers, his extra toiletry bag.
It was as if he couldn’t stand to be here a second longer than necessary.
His presence, once so familiar, now felt strange and intrusive, like he’d never traversed this space before and shouldn’t be now.
I stood in the doorway, arms crossed, watching him as if outside my own body.
Three years together were gone in the time it took him to fill a duffel bag.
Winston padded behind him the whole time, his tail wagging, oblivious, thinking Cole was about to take him for a walk. My throat tightened at the thought. Winston had no idea that his “dad” was leaving for good.
I swallowed hard and asked, “So are you going to say anything?”
Cole didn’t look up from where he was untangling his phone charger from the nightstand. His shoulders tensed before he spoke, his voice flat, as if he was reciting lines. “What’s left to say?”
I tried to find anything to delay watching him walk out the door. “I don’t know… What about Winston?”
“He’s yours, Ainsley. I bought him for you.”
“Aren’t you going to miss him?” I asked.
Cole stopped dead in his tracks. “Please don’t do this. Don’t make it harder than it already is. Of course I’m going to miss him and—”
I cut him off. “Don’t.”
“If you find anything else that I didn’t grab, you can text me or give it to Grace, and I’ll get it from Tucker,” he said.
I hated how calm he sounded. How logical. As if this was some business transaction and not the dismantling of everything we had built together.
“So that’s it then?” My voice cracked, exposing the rawness of what I was feeling inside. The ache had settled into my chest so thick that it would suffocate me if I let it.
He paused at the door, box in hand, tail between his legs, and I could see it in his face—the shame, the guilt.
He knew exactly what he was doing, breaking every promise, every plan for the future we’d ever made.
Each I love you forever was walking out the door with him, not because it didn’t matter but because it wasn’t enough to last.
I couldn’t let it end like this.
“I don’t get it,” I whispered as I stepped closer to him, trying to block the door.
“Why even put me through the last few months of thinking that things would work out? You said you wanted us both to try.” My voice grew more urgent, shaky with emotion.
“Why couldn’t you have just let me go back then, when I expected it?
Is this some cruel joke? You try to stitch us back together while simultaneously falling for someone else just so you can leave me anyway? ”
He closed his eyes for a moment. “Ainsley, I don’t know what I can say to make this better.”
The words hit me like a punch to the gut. How could he just write off everything we had with such indifference? Simultaneously he was erasing our history and breaking my heart.
“I hate you,” I choked out. Even as the words left my mouth, I wasn’t sure if I meant them. But I needed them to hurt him. Just once.
My eyes burned, and a single tear slipped down my cheek, trailing warmth against the cold numbness that was spreading through my body.
Cole’s eyes softened, but he didn’t move.
He didn’t try to comfort me. He didn’t say he was sorry.
Instead, he glanced down at Winston, who was now sitting at my feet, wagging his tail, still clueless as to what was happening.
Winston looked up at him expectantly, probably thinking Cole would grab his leash any second now.
But he wasn’t taking Winston. He was leaving him. Leaving us.