Chapter Three
Cracks in the Vows
Jace
The Present
The house is quiet and not a peaceful quiet, or the kind that settles in your bones after a long day. It’s the kind that hums with things unsaid.
The TV is on in the living room, some reality show playing low, but Sierra isn’t watching it.
She’s curled on the end of the couch, legs tucked under her, scrolling through her phone with a glass of wine balanced in her hand.
I’m at the table with my laptop open, film queued up, trying to focus on the grainy clips of wide receivers’ cutting routes.
I tell myself I’m being productive. Truth is, I’ve been watching the same play on repeat for five minutes and couldn’t describe a single detail.
The takeout containers are still on the counter, half-empty cartons we barely touched. She ate in the living room, I ate standing at the counter. Neither of us asked about the other’s day.
Our nights look different these days, compared to when we first got married. Parallel lives under the same roof. She drinks her wine. I pretend to work. Words stay locked somewhere between us, and the silence grows heavier by the day.
I glance at her. She’s beautiful, always has been, but there’s a distance in her face now, a weariness that wasn’t there when we started this. She laughs sometimes, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. Tonight, she hasn’t even tried.
I close the laptop with more force than I need to, and the sound makes her jump. Her gaze flicks up, then back down to her screen.
“You’re somewhere else again, aren’t you?” she says finally, her voice soft but sharp enough to cut.
I press my thumb to the bridge of my nose. “Just tired.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Her eyes lift this time, and I hold them.
I don’t know what she sees, maybe the truth I’ve been trying to bury since the day I said vows I meant but couldn’t live up to.
She deserves better than the shell I’ve become, better than a man who’s sitting here wishing he could turn back time and choose differently.
I look away first. “A lot going on lately.”
She doesn’t argue, just hums under her breath like she’s filing the response away with all the others. I can almost hear the box in her head labeled excuses.
Eventually, we drift through the motions of the night.
Lights off. Dishes ignored. We climb into bed without a word.
She turns onto her side before I’ve even pulled the sheets up, her back to me, the same as every night lately.
She used to fall asleep with her head on my chest, her hand splayed across my stomach like she needed to know I was there.
Now she faces the wall, a gulf of cool sheets between us.
I lie there staring at the ceiling, the shadows from the streetlamp outside cutting across the room. I think about the curve of her shoulders under the blanket, the rise and fall of her breathing.
I care about her. I respect her. I love her.
But hell, I don’t know if I’ve ever been in love with her, and maybe that’s the problem.
Because it’s not the kind of love that keeps you awake, restless and reaching for each other, desperate to hold on until sleep finally drags you under.
It’s not the kind that carves itself into your ribs and won’t let go, no matter how many years pass.
I press a hand over my chest like I can quiet the pulse that’s racing for all the wrong reasons. My vows were supposed to be a promise, a line I wouldn’t cross. But every day I wake up wanting someone else, someone I can’t have and shouldn’t want.
Every time I picture Sarah’s face, I tell myself it’s wrong, that I made my choice. But wanting doesn’t listen to reason. It doesn’t bow to vows. It just lives there, constant and pulsing under my skin.
And that truth sits in the room with us, louder than the silence, and heavier than the distance.
When the lights go out, the quiet doesn’t soften. It stretches, pulling wider, until it feels like we’re lying in two different worlds instead of the same bed. Nights like this always drag her back. Not Sierra, Sarah.
Her presence is louder in these moments than it ever was when she was near. Every crack in this marriage, every silence between me and Sierra, pulls her name to the front of my mind. She’s always been there, even when she wasn’t.
Seeing Sarah last night has my head spinning more than usual.
I tell myself to focus, to stay in the present, but my mind drifts anyway. Back to a night after college, during a holiday break. One moment I never really learned how to forget.
It was before Sierra and I ever got serious. I ran into Sarah downtown, when everyone was back home for the holidays.
She was leaning against the bar, hair loose around her shoulders, laughing at something I didn’t catch.
The sound rolled over me, sharp and familiar, like no time had passed at all.
My chest tightened, my feet moving before my brain caught up, because seeing her like that, unguarded, alive…
shook me in a way nothing else ever has.
She looked the same and different all at once, her hair longer, her laugh sharper, like life had already been chipping at her edges but hadn’t dulled her shine.
We ended up back at my place, the pull between us just as reckless as it had always been. I remember the way her hands shook when she touched me, like she knew it was wrong but couldn’t stop. Hell, I couldn’t stop either.
But the part I can’t shake isn’t the way she kissed me, or the way I felt like I’d finally come up for air after years of drowning. It’s the way she pulled back after, sitting on the edge of my bed with her shirt half-buttoned and her eyes too bright.
“I can’t do this,” she whispered, more to herself than to me.
“Do what?” I asked, even though I knew.
“Be this. The other woman.” She shook her head, swallowing hard. “That’s not me, Jace. It’s never going to be me.”
And then she left. Just like that. No slammed doors, no fight. Just the quiet sound of her footsteps down the hall and the hollow ache that settled in after.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, shirt half-off, hands useless in my lap.
I wanted to call her back, to tell her she was wrong, that she’d never be “the other woman” to me.
But the words stuck in my throat, swallowed by the sound of the door clicking shut.
The apartment felt bigger without her in it, every shadow stretching wider, every silence sharper.
I lay awake until morning, trying to convince myself it was for the best. That she was right. That maybe if I leaned harder into the life waiting for me—into Sierra—I’d learn how to stop wanting what I couldn’t have.
But I didn’t. Not really. Because even when I chose to move forward, part of me was still standing in that room with Sarah, wishing she’d stayed.
The memory fades when Sierra shifts beside me. I blink, pulling myself back to the present, to my wife lying inches away but feeling miles apart. She’s awake. I can tell by the tightness in her shoulders, the way her breaths aren’t as even as she wants me to think.
Her voice cuts through the dark, quiet but steady. “You ever wonder what life would’ve looked like if you’d chosen differently?”
The words hit like a strike to the ribs. She doesn’t say more, doesn’t have to. We both know what’s beneath them, even if her name isn’t spoken.
My stomach knots, because the truth is yes—every damn day.
I’ve built a marriage, a home, a life with Sierra, but all it takes is one question to unravel it.
I want to tell her I don’t think about it, that I don’t see Sarah in the back of my mind when the house is quiet, that I don’t wonder what it would’ve been like if she’d stayed that night.
But I can’t. Because she’d hear the lie in my voice, just like I hear it in my head.
I roll onto my side, away from the weight of her question. “Thinking about ‘what ifs’ only makes it worse.”
It’s a lie, one we both hear for exactly what it is.
She goes quiet again, but the tension doesn’t fade. It just settles deeper into the mattress, into the air between us.
I close my eyes, but all I can see is Sarah walking away from me that night. And the truth I’ll never say out loud—that I’ve been chasing her shadow ever since.
…………
Sierra
He turns away, and the bed shifts with him.
The space between us feels wider than it should, too much space, too much silence.
I stare at the ceiling, tracing the shadows from the streetlight outside as they slide across the plaster, thinking how strange it is that you can share a bed with someone and still feel alone.
He said there’s no point wondering. But that’s all I ever do anymore.
Wonder when the quiet stopped being comfortable.
Wonder when his touch started to feel like a habit instead of want.
Wonder if he ever looks at me and still sees the same girl he promised forever to, or if he’s already somewhere else, chasing what he lost.
I tell myself it’s just the season, the schedule, the late nights and early mornings.
That every marriage hits a slow patch. It’s only been a year, it shouldn’t be like this so soon.
But deep down, I know that’s not what this is, it’s stalled.
We’ve both been holding the same thread for so long we’ve forgotten what it was supposed to tie together.
He shifts again, and for a second I think he’s going to reach for me. My breath catches, waiting. But his hand falls still, and the sound of the clock fills the room instead. Tick, tick, tick, steady as the distance grows between us.
I roll onto my side, facing the wall, eyes open in the dark. I used to fall asleep to the sound of his breathing and feel safe. Now it just reminds me how much space there is left to lose.
I close my eyes and pretend I don’t already know we’re losing each other.
…………
Jace
The fight doesn’t start with Sarah. It never does. It starts with the little things.