24. Dean
Dean
Dean’s phone buzzed.
Emma has posted.
He shouldn't have notifications turned on. He knew he shouldn't. But knowing Fiona was staying with Emma, knowing she was commuting from Sweetwater every day—it felt like drowning slowly, and these little digital breadcrumbs were the only air he could find.
Emma's latest post appeared on screen—a simple repost of something, with her own comment at the top: This is why I love my sister.
Below it was a post from an account he didn't recognize: @missfionasays.
Dean's heart stopped.
She'd made her own account.
His finger moved without his permission, tapping on her profile. @missfionasays opened up, and there she was—her bio reading "It's not a flaw, it's a gift 5th grade teacher, recovering people-pleaser, rebranding kindness as strength."
Recovering people-pleaser.
He scrolled down. Three posts total.
Dean’s eyes devoured the words like he could crawl inside them. It was agony. It was ecstasy. It felt like he was starving and this—this was the first real bite he’d had in weeks. Even secondhand, even filtered through a screen, Fiona still tasted like oxygen.
You don't have to be perfect to be proud of yourself. Trying again after something felt hard? That's brave. That counts.
The comments were small but genuine. Supportive. Real people saying real things:
"needed this today thank you" "this hit me right in the heart" "you're helping more people than you know"
Dean set his phone down.
While he'd been sitting in his empty apartment drowning in guilt and self-loathing, she'd been doing what she'd always done.
Creating something kind. Something healing. Something that helped other people feel less alone.
"It's not a flaw, it's a gift."
God. She was talking about herself. About the things he'd mocked, the traits he'd turned into punchlines. She was reclaiming them. Defending them. Celebrating them.
She was doing for herself what he should have been doing all along.
Dean picked up his phone again, scrolled back to her first post.
People were finding her. People were listening. People were being helped.
The way she'd always helped her students. The way she'd helped him, back when he'd been worth helping.
He thought about @shitfionasays, with its legion of followers and its cruel comment sections and its monetized mockery. Numbers he'd been so proud of. Engagement he'd thought meant success.
This was what success actually looked like. This small, genuine connection. This quiet revolution of kindness.
This was Fiona, unfiltered and unperformed and completely, authentically herself.
Dean closed the app and put his phone face-down on the counter.
His cereal had gone soggy. He dumped it in the sink and stood there, hands gripping the edge of the counter, trying to breathe around the crushing weight of what he'd lost.
Not just a wife. Not just a marriage.
He'd lost the chance to be part of something beautiful. The chance to support something that mattered. The chance to be the kind of person who lifted her up instead of tearing her down.
She was going to be fine. More than fine. She was going to help people, change lives, make the world a little softer.
And he was going to spend the rest of his life knowing he could have been part of that.
He was weak.
Weak and pathetic and utterly, irredeemably small.
The realization wasn’t intellectual—it was cellular . Full-body. Like every nerve ending had suddenly come online just to hum with shame. He braced his palms harder against the counter, trying not to shake.
He was a fool. A moron. A man so numb to goodness he’d mistaken sincerity for weakness. He’d taken the softest thing he’d ever felt—his love for her—and twisted it into something sharp so people wouldn’t see his vulnerability.
And he hadn’t thought about the consequences.
A parasite. That’s what he was.
And somehow, impossibly, she had loved him. Loved him despite the cracks. Despite the rot. She’d offered him everything.
Until she saw the truth. Until she saw him .
The version without the polish. The one beneath the curated charm and career success.
A man who laughed behind his wife’s back and called it affection.
He let out a breath that rattled in his chest.
Fiona had survived the thing he did to her—and turned it into light . She’d taken the broken pieces and repurposed them into something with purpose.
He knew he had to read through the posts he had made. He had to see what he'd actually done to her, not the sanitized version he'd been telling himself. Not the "harmless jokes" or "affectionate teasing" his mind had rewritten it as.
He had to read @shitfionasays the way Fiona had read it. The way twenty-three thousand strangers had read it.
Dean slid down onto the kitchen floor, back against the cabinets, knees pulled to his chest like a child.
He just wasn’t sure how he would be able to live with the knowledge once he did.
Dean shouldn’t be here.
The sensible part of his brain—what was left of it—told him that as he sat in his car across the street from the elementary school, parked like a creeper with coffee he wasn’t drinking and a heart that wouldn’t stop pounding.
He wasn’t stalking her.
He wasn’t.
He just… wanted to see her. From a distance. One real moment, unfiltered. Just her.
He was pathetic. A grown man reduced to lurking outside his estranged wife's workplace.
The pickup line was still. Afternoon sun hit the building at a slant, glinting off windows and casting long shadows across the sidewalk. And then—because the universe didn’t know how much he didn’t deserve it—she stepped out the front doors.
Fiona.
In a long cardigan that fluttered around her knees, hair half-up, glasses perched low on her nose as she spoke to a student walking beside her.
She bent down, smiled, tied a shoelace. Stood back up and ruffled the kid’s hair gently before sending him off with a paper in his hand and confidence in his step.
God, she was beautiful.
More than beautiful. She was spectacular in the way that mattered—in her gentleness, her purpose, the way she made that anxious kid feel safe just by paying attention.
Dean blinked hard.
He used to be part of this. Part of her . He used to be the one who got to hold that hand, make that coffee, hear about that shoelace over dinner.
And now?
He was just a man in a car, watching the love of his life walk through the world without him.
He'd destroyed the best thing in his life and now he was reduced to this—watching her from a distance like the creep he'd apparently always been.
She was what he wanted in his life. The woman that lit up classrooms and calmed nerves and made shy kids brave. The kind that used kindness like armor and carried the world on her soft, stubborn shoulders.
She didn’t look back. Didn’t hesitate. Didn’t glance around like she was missing something.
Because she wasn’t.
Of course she wasn't missing anything. Why would she miss the man who'd turned her into a joke? He was nothing. Less than nothing.
She had her students. Her friends. Her healing. Her new social media account full of truth and heart and kindness.
And he had… regret. The heavy kind. The kind that sits on your chest and makes you say things like, “I should have…” “I didn’t know….”
This was what he'd mocked. This dedication. This sweetness. This woman who stayed late to make sure every child felt seen.
Christ, he was disgusting.
Dean watched as she hefted her bag over her shoulder, and walked toward the faculty parking lot. Her movements were efficient but unhurried. Practiced. She belonged here, in this world of construction paper and juice boxes and small humans who needed someone to believe in them.
He'd never belonged in her world. Not really. He'd just convinced himself he was sophisticated enough to appreciate it ironically.
But there was nothing ironic about the way she'd loved him. Nothing detached about the trust she'd placed in him. Nothing cool about the way she'd given him every vulnerable piece of herself and asked for nothing but respect in return.
Dean pressed his forehead against the steering wheel.
He'd been so proud of his detachment. His ability to observe and comment and stay above it all. He'd thought that made him smart. Sophisticated. Better than people who felt things too deeply.
But watching Fiona now—seeing her in her element, doing work that mattered—he realized the truth:
She was everything he'd pretended to be too cool for. And she was everything he'd ever wanted to be.
Kind without irony. Genuine without shame. Present without performance.
She'd never needed to be cool. She'd never needed detachment. She had something better—purpose, connection, the ability to make the world softer just by existing in it.
And he'd traded that for likes from strangers who would forget her the moment they scrolled past.
Fiona reached her car—his car—and paused. For a second, Dean's heart stopped, thinking she'd seen him. But she was just checking her phone, probably a text from Emma or a reminder about groceries.
Normal life. Moving on.
She got in the car and drove away, and Dean sat there in the empty parking lot, surrounded by the ghosts of everything he'd destroyed.
He wasn't cool. He wasn't detached. He wasn't above anything.
He was just a man who'd had everything and thrown it away because he was too scared to admit he needed it.
Too scared to admit that being loved by Fiona was the only thing that had ever made him feel real.
Dean kept his eyes on the road Fiona had driven done. But she was already gone.
Dean put his head on the steering wheel and took a couple of deep breaths. The car still smelled faintly like her chapstick and the air freshener she'd hung from the rearview mirror.
He pulled out his phone. His thumb hovered over the app.
Just do it. Just fucking do it.
The account blinked up on the screen.
He scrolled to the beginning, two years ago.
Each caption designed to make her look naive. Childlike. Amusing.