Chapter Three #2
“You missed dinner again.” Sierra’s voice is clipped as she sets her wine glass down harder than she probably meant to. The red liquid sloshes over the rim, catching the light from the lamp.
“I told you practice ran late,” I answer, kicking off my shoes by the door. My bag slides off my shoulder with a dull thud. “Recruiting meetings stacked on top of it. I couldn’t just walk out.”
She crosses her arms, leaning against the counter like she’s bracing herself. “You couldn’t text?”
I drag a hand through my hair, my jaw tight. “I didn’t think it was worth starting a fight over a plate of cold pasta.”
Her laugh is short and humorless. “It’s not the pasta, Jace. It’s never about the pasta.”
Her eyes flash. “It’s you coming home to cold food and even colder silence. It’s sitting here night after night wondering if you even see me anymore. Half the time it feels like I’m living with a ghost, and the worst part is, I don’t even think you care.”
The silence that follows is sharp, filling every corner of the kitchen. She doesn’t have to spell it out. I know what she means, what she’s always meant. The distance. The way I’m here without being here.
I try to swallow it down, to let it pass like we usually do, but tonight she doesn’t let me.
Her eyes cut to the corner of the counter. My stomach drops. My pulse stumbles. Every muscle in my body locks like I’ve just been caught cheating, because in her eyes, I have.
Fuck! The note I should’ve thrown away, the one I couldn’t bring myself to let go of.
She picks it up carefully, almost reverently, like touching it confirms what she already knows. Her fingers trace the edge before she turns it toward me. “This was tucked in your playbook,”she says, quietly. “It fell out when I went to move it earlier.”
My pulse stumbles. The ink is faded at the corners where I’ve unfolded it too many times, the curve of each letter burned into me like a brand.
I imagine the way her hands must’ve shaken when she wrote it, the way she tucked it away like a secret she couldn’t say out loud.
I found it after she decided she was done, shoved in my bag like proof that I’d been too blind to choose her when it mattered.
That she’d handed me her heart, and I was too damn careless to hold on. That I let her slip through my fingers.
The sight of Sarah’s handwriting, familiar even after all this time, punches the air from my lungs. Just a single line, scrawled across the page: You didn’t lose me, Jace. You just didn’t choose me.
I reach for it, but Sierra pulls back. “Don’t.” Her voice wavers, sharp and breaking all at once. “Just don’t insult me with excuses.”
“Sierra…” I start, but there’s nothing else. No way to explain why I kept it, why I still look at it some nights when the silence feels unbearable.
She shakes her head, tears brimming but not falling. “I can’t keep doing this, Jace. I can’t keep being married to a man who’s in love with someone else. You don’t have to say her name. I see it every time you look away from me.”
The words gut me, but I can’t deny them. I open my mouth, but nothing comes.
“I love you,” she says, quieter now, almost pleading. “I’ve tried to be enough. But I can’t compete with the shadow she still casts over you, the part of you that will always be hers. I don’t even think you want me to.”
My chest tightens until I can’t breathe. “It’s not—” The lie burns out before it’s formed. Because it is. It always has been.
“You think I don’t try?” My voice comes out harsher than it should. “You think I haven’t spent every goddamn day since the wedding choosing you?”
“Choosing me shouldn’t feel like punishment, Jace.” Her eyes glisten, but her voice is steady.
She pauses to try and compose herself. “I shouldn’t have to wonder if I’m your second choice every time you close your eyes.”
Her face crumples, not in anger but resignation. “You may love me, Jace. But you’re not in love with me. And I deserve someone who is.”
I want to tell her she’s wrong, that we can fix this, but the truth presses too heavy on my tongue. My hand curls into a fist at my side, useless.
The silence stretches, thick and suffocating. Finally, I grab my keys from the counter. The metal jingles in the quiet like a gavel.
“Don’t,” she whispers again, but it’s softer this time, not a command—just a plea, one last lifeline to save our drowning marriage.
I can’t stay. Not with tears shining in her eyes, not with Sarah’s words burning between us.
So I leave. The door clicks shut behind me, sealing the space I couldn’t fill. Every step feels like proof she’s right. And for the first time, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to walk back through it.
The night air bites when I step outside.
It’s colder than it should be for the season, or maybe that’s just me, hollowed out and raw.
My keys feel heavy in my hand, and for a second I think about going back inside.
About trying one more time with Sierra, sitting her down, saying all the things I can’t seem to force past my lips.
But the image of her standing in the kitchen with Sarah’s note in her hand guts me. The tears she tried to hide. The way her voice broke when she said she deserved someone who was in love with her.
She’s right. And instead of going back in to prove her wrong, I slide into my truck like a coward and start driving.
The roads blur under my headlights, familiar streets that don’t feel familiar at all. My hands move on instinct, but my head is somewhere else. Everywhere else. The guilt follows me no matter how fast I go.
I should be home. I should be fixing what I broke. I should be choosing my wife.
But the truth is something I can’t outrun. I’ve been choosing Sarah for years, even when she wasn’t in the room. Even when I slipped a ring on another woman’s finger.
I grip the steering wheel tighter, the leather groaning under my hands.
My vows were supposed to be a line I wouldn’t cross, but I never really stayed on the right side of it did I?
Not when Sarah’s face lives under my skin.
Not when the sound of her laugh still cuts through every silence.
Not when her name sits on the back of my tongue, waiting.
The truck eats up miles, and I let it. Block after block, stoplight after stoplight, until the houses start to look familiar in a way that makes my stomach twist.
By the time I realize where I am, it’s too late.
Sarah’s neighborhood.
My chest tightens when I slow at the corner. Porch lights glow in soft pools, dogs bark somewhere in the distance, and the street is too quiet, too still. I shouldn’t be here. God, I know I shouldn’t.
But my headlights skim over her driveway, and instinct has me checking for her car before I can stop myself. It’s there. Same spot. Same house. I told myself I’d never come here again.
I pull to the curb anyway.
Her window is lit on the second floor, blinds drawn but cracked just enough for a sliver of light to spill out. A shadow moves behind it, and my breath catches. She’s awake.
I shouldn’t know that. I shouldn’t care. But the sight of her light glowing in the dark yanks me back to every night I ever watched her walk away, every second I let her slip through my fingers.
My hand drags down my face, rough and useless. I should turn the wheel, hit the gas, and get as far from here as possible before I make this worse. Before I ruin everything beyond repair.
But I don’t.
I sit there like an idiot, engine idling, caught between the life I promised and the life I wanted. The ring on my finger feels like it weighs a hundred pounds, pressing into the steering wheel. My vows echo in my head, hollow now, words I meant but couldn’t keep.
I glance back at the window. Still lit.
The urge to get out, to knock on her door, to see her face one more time is so strong it hurts. My hand even twitches toward the handle.
But what then? What the hell would I say? That I’m sorry? That I never stopped loving her? That every day with someone else felt like pretending?
The truth is a weapon, and if I use it now, I’ll burn down whatever pieces of my life are left.
So I stay frozen, one hand on the wheel, one on the gearshift, trapped in the space between leaving and staying.
And that’s where she still has me. Not in her arms, not in her life—but in the pull I can’t shake, the gravity that keeps dragging me back no matter how far I try to run.
My vows might’ve been spoken to someone else, but the truth is brutal, unshakable.
I left them at the altar. I never left her.