Doubt Creeps In
Dante
I leave the conference room without looking back.
She actually has the nerve to judge me for moving on.
She vanished without an explanation, without even the decency of a goodbye—and somehow I’m the one being condemned?
I’m the one who’s supposed to justify trying to survive her absence?
I still remember those nights.
The first few weeks after she disappeared, I stopped eating. Stopped sleeping. Every time I closed my eyes, I searched for her in the dark.
Her voice. Her perfume. The warmth of her body against mine.
I missed her so badly it felt lethal.
During the day, I tore the world apart looking for her. I imagined her injured somewhere, dying, calling out for me.
I hired private investigators, contacted hospitals, harassed the police until they started looking at me with that pity people wear once they’ve already accepted the outcome.
Some nights, the pain got so sharp the only way to dull it was alcohol.
I’m not proud of those nights.
Of those bottles emptied alone in an apartment where everything still whispered her name.
When I hit rock bottom, Bianca showed up.
She didn’t say much. She simply stayed. Mourning her best friend while I mourned the woman I loved.
Her quiet presence soothed me.
We grew closer.
Shared grief slowly became something else.
Something more intimate.
And now Valeria comes back and looks at me like I betrayed our vows.
Like she still has the right to expect anything from me.
“What do you think, Dante?”
Bianca’s voice pulls me back to the present.
Curled beside me on the couch with her legs tucked beneath her, her head resting against my shoulder, she watches me with that soft patience that always seems to define her.
“Sorry. I was somewhere else.”
“I know,” she says quietly. “You’re thinking about her.”
It isn’t an accusation.
Just an observation.
“So am I,” she adds after a pause. “I haven’t stopped thinking about it since she came back. Did she explain why she disappeared?”
“No. Nothing.”
She sighs.
There’s something in the sound that resembles sadness and confusion.
“How could she do this to us? Let us grieve her, mourn her, rebuild our lives… while she was alive the entire time.” She shakes her head faintly. “I can’t understand it.”
She pauses before adding more softly,
“I feel like I never really knew her at all.”
I don’t know if it’s her tone or her words, but suddenly I can’t stand hearing Bianca talk about Valeria anymore.
Once, these moments with Bianca were exactly what I needed.
Now they grate against my nerves.
For the first time, I hear the criticism beneath the apparent kindness.
Bianca is jealous of Valeria.
Is that new? Or was it always there?
Doubt creeps back in.
What if Valeria had been there? What if she had been injured in the fire?
But then why wouldn’t she have contacted me?
The inspector in charge of the case said no one could’ve survived.
And yet she’s here.
Alive.
A memory surfaces—sharp and painful, like a shard of glass still lodged beneath the skin.
It was shortly before she disappeared.
We’d just made love. She was curled against me, tracing absent patterns against my skin with her fingertips.
“I want us to start a family,” she’d whispered. “I’m ready. I want a baby that’s half you and half me so badly.”
I told her I wanted the same thing.
Three weeks later, she vanished.
Do people whisper about babies in the dark when they’re already planning to disappear three weeks later?
To abandon everything behind them?
That doesn’t sound like her.
So how do I explain her return?
She looks untouched. No one survives something like that untouched.
“She’ll explain eventually,” Bianca murmurs against my shoulder. “Or maybe she won’t. But either way, it changes nothing between us.”
She tilts her face up toward mine.
“We can’t trust her anymore. We’re clearly not her priority now.”
Again, something about her words unsettles me.
“No,” I say slowly. “We’re not her priority anymore.”
Silence stretches between us.
Then she asks softly,
“Do you think we should still invite her to the wedding?”
The question jerks me violently back to reality.
The wedding.
I’m so fucked.