11. Maddox Creed #6
I just stood here staring at the wall across from me while everything that had happened replayed itself in my head. The hallway was quiet except for a few distant voices drifting from somewhere farther down the building.
After a minute, I started walking without any real destination in mind. I wasn’t trying to get anywhere. I just needed to move. Needed a little space where nobody expected me to have another answer.
I loved my children more than anything on this earth, and nothing was ever going to change that. The problem with this was, another decision had been made for me before I’d ever been given the chance to make it myself.
My jaw tightened as I stood here replaying everything in my head. The NDA. Gia. Nylah. Now this. On the surface, they looked like four completely different situations, but the more I thought about them, the more I realized they all pointed to the same damn problem.
Nobody trusted me to make my own choices.
Everybody kept deciding what I should know, what I could handle, and what was supposedly best for me before I ever had a chance to speak for myself.
She kept deciding what my life should look like before I ever got the chance to decide for myself.
I walked over to the window overlooking the parking lot and rested my hands against my hips while staring outside.
The scary part about all this wasn’t even what I’d just learned already. It was now the fact that, for the first time, I found myself wondering if there was something else waiting around the corner.
That thought pissed me off more than anything.
Broken trust had a way of doing that. It made you question things that would’ve never crossed your mind before. It planted doubt where certainty used to live, and once it got there, it didn’t leave quietly.
My mind drifted back to everything we’d talked about inside that office.
The questions about love.
The questions about trust.
The questions about whether my marriage could survive any of this.
By the time I finished replaying the conversation in my head, I realized how exhausted I really was. It wasn’t physical exhaustion. It went a whole lot deeper than that.
I was emotionally drained.
Mentally exhausted.
Soul tired.
All that…
The sound of footsteps behind me pulled me out of my thoughts.
When I turned around, Dr. Reynolds was standing several feet away. She’d given me enough space to breathe without making it seem like she’d abandoned me, and for a few seconds, neither one of us said anything.
Then she slid her hands into her pockets.
“You okay?”
A real laugh escaped before I could stop it.
“The hell kind of question is that?”
The corner of her mouth lifted just enough to let me know she understood.
“Fair…”
I looked back out the window.
After a minute, Dr. Reynolds spoke again.
“Are you leaving?”
The question hung between us. It was simple, direct, yet somehow harder to answer than it should’ve been.
My eyes followed a car as it pulled out of a parking space, and for a second, I imagined getting in my truck and driving away. I could go home. I could go to work. Hell, I could drive anywhere except back into that office.
The crazy part was, I knew I could.
Nobody was forcing me to stay. Nobody was forcing me to fight for my marriage or keep showing up to therapy. For the first time in a long time, the decision belonged to me, and I stood here letting that sink in before slowly shaking my head.
“No…”
Dr. Reynolds didn’t respond right away. She didn’t congratulate me or turn it into some motivational speech about determination. She just stood there, giving me the space to arrive at my own decision, and honestly, I appreciated that more than she probably realized.
“I ain’t leaving,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck. “I’m pissed off. I’m hurt. I got more questions than answers right now, but walking out ain’t gonna fix none of it.”
The words felt heavier once they were out in the open, mostly because I knew they were true. As much as a part of me wanted to be done with all of this, another part of me knew I wasn’t ready to quit.
Not yet.
“I just needed a minute.”
Dr. Reynolds nodded.
“That’s allowed.”
We stood here quietly for another few seconds before my eyes drifted back toward the office door. Luciana was waiting on the other side of it, along with every unanswered question that had been hanging over our marriage for weeks.
The truth was, I still didn’t know what happened next. I didn’t know if our marriage survived this. I didn’t know if trust could ever fully come back, and I damn sure didn’t know if love was enough to rebuild everything we’d broken.
What I did know was that walking away wouldn’t answer any of those questions.
It would only leave them unanswered.
I pushed myself away from the window, and Dr. Reynolds quietly stepped aside, giving me enough room to pass. She didn’t say another word or try to influence my decision.
She simply let me make it.
For a second, I just stood here with my hand wrapped around the doorknob, taking one last breath before turning the handle.
Then I opened the door and walked back inside.