Chapter Twenty-Five - Daniel
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Daniel
DANIEL SAT AT the kitchen table, staring at the blank wall ahead of him.
He had thought—stupidly, selfishly, pathetically thought—that he could fix this. That he just needed to talk to her, say the right things, remind her of everything they had.
He bent forward, pressing his forehead against the edge of the table.
He couldn’t lose her.
He couldn’t.
Daniel exhaled sharply, rubbing his hands down his face. He needed—fuck, he didn’t know what he needed.
He needed to talk to someone.
For years, it had always been Hannah. She was the one who made sense of things. The one who listened, who saw through his bullshit, who made him feel like—like he was worth something.
But she wasn’t there anymore. And he had no one to blame but himself.
His chest ached, a deep, raw pulse of loss, and before he could think better of it, he grabbed his phone, swiping through his contacts.
James? No chance in hell.
His coworkers? They only saw the version of him that existed in meetings, in pitch rooms—polished, in control. Not… this.
His mother? He couldn’t bear her knowing what he’d done.
His father?
He hesitated.
It was a bad idea.
His father wasn’t the kind of man you went to for comfort. He didn’t do emotion. He didn’t do reflection. He was the kind of man who told you to get up and get over it, to stop wallowing and be a man.
And yet. He needed something. Someone . Even if it was the wrong someone.
Daniel’s grip on the phone tightened.
Maybe he’d offer a path. Something ugly but direct.
He grabbed his keys with shaking hands, moving like he wasn’t fully inside his body.
The walls of the house felt too close. The air too thick. Her absence screamed in every quiet corner.
He paused in the doorway, glancing once—stupidly—at the coat she used to hang there.
Gone.
He closed his eyes.
He had spent so much of his life trying not to be his father. Trying to unlearn everything the man had taught him about women, and love, and failure. And yet here he was.
Desperate. Lost. Running to the last place he should go, just to find something that might stop the bleeding.
The drive blurred around him—lights and turns and road signs he didn’t see. Just Hannah. Her face. The look in her eyes when she’d said “I will never forgive you.
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He didn’t want to be here. But he had nowhere else to go.
Hannah was gone. Gone in every way that counted. And still— still —he kept hoping for a thread. A splinter of hope he could hold in his fists. Something to tell him it wasn’t over.
He knocked.
Isabella answered the door, her brows lifting when she saw him. Her expression flickered—surprise first, then weariness. A little disdain.
“Daniel.”
His throat felt dry. “Is my father here?”
She didn’t answer right away. Just scanned him—face drawn, eyes hollowed out from days without sleep. She saw it all. She always had.
Then she sighed and stepped back, opening the door wider. “Of course not.”
Daniel hesitated, just long enough to feel the shame crawl across his skin. Then he stepped inside, the air cooler than he remembered. Unwelcoming.
His father’s house hadn’t changed. Sleek surfaces. Faux comfort. A sense of wealth without warmth. Decor rotated out like seasonal fashion. None of it meant anything.
Neither did the people, usually.
Isabella. Older than Daniel by only a few years. His father’s latest version of "forever."
She closed the door behind him, crossing her arms and leaning against it. “You look like shit.”
He let out a humorless breath. “Feel worse.”
She nodded once, without sympathy. “Sit down. I’ll get the whiskey.”
He obeyed, lowering himself onto the edge of the couch like he wasn’t sure he had permission to take up space. Like the air in the room was rationed.
The silence in the house throbbed. Cold. Dead.
He remembered the last time he’d been here—months ago. His father had made a passing insult about his mother. Hannah had been the one to call it out.
Isabella returned with two glasses, passing him one wordlessly before she sat on the opposite chair, legs tucked up, eyes sharp and waiting.
Daniel stared at the glass. The whiskey glinted amber in the light, calm and cruel. He didn’t drink. Not really. But he took a sip. It burned all the way down.
“I don’t even know why I came here,” he muttered, voice hollow.
That wasn’t true.
He did know.
He was desperate.
Hannah had been the air in his lungs, the gravity in his days. The thing that gave his life shape. Without her, he felt like he was floating. No direction. No anchor. No north star.
And somehow, this —this cold, sterile house—had become the only place he could think to go.
“I guess I thought he might say something,” Daniel admitted. “Tell me I’m not a total fucking lost cause.”
Isabella just sipped her drink like she’d heard worse.
Then Daniel exhaled sharply, the pain swelling too big to carry alone. “Hannah’s gone,” he said. “She’s really gone.”
Isabella tilted her head, unsympathetic. “What did you do?”
The words tasted like rust. “I cheated.”
There was no softening. No flicker of surprise.
Just disgust.
She blinked once. “Well.”
Daniel laughed, bitter and ugly. “Yeah. Well.”
The silence crackled between them.
“I thought—” He broke off, swallowing hard. “I thought if I showed her I was sorry… if I just gave her time… she’d come back.”
“Did she say she would?” Isabella asked, blunt as ever.
He shook his head. “No.”
“Then why would you think that?”
His voice cracked. “Because I needed her to.”
Because he loved her. Because he needed someone to save him from himself.
Isabella stared at him, something sharp in her gaze. “You’re just like him.”
Daniel flinched.
“Your father replaces women to avoid facing himself,” she continued. “And you—” She lifted her glass. “You cheated on the one person who actually saw you.”
“I’m not like him,” Daniel said quickly. Too quickly.
Her mouth curved, not quite a smile. “No? Then why are you here?”
His hands trembled against the glass. He set it down.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I thought I could outrun becoming him and now—now I’m not sure I didn’t run in a fucking circle.”
She watched him. Measured. “You didn’t leave her. But you replaced her just the same.”
Daniel didn’t argue.
What was there to say?
He looked down at his hands. The same hands that had once lifted Hannah’s face like she was made of starlight. The same hands that had held her when she was sick. Braided her hair once, terribly. Pressed against the small of her back while they danced in the kitchen.
And now? They were the hands of a man she couldn’t stand to touch.
“I don’t deserve her,” he said, quietly.
Isabella didn’t nod. Didn’t reassure him. She just let the silence stretch.
Then, finally, she leaned forward and said the one thing he hadn’t been ready to ask himself.
“So what are you going to do about it?”
Daniel didn’t answer.
Because right now?
He didn’t know.
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Daniel didn’t remember driving home.
He barely remembered pulling into the driveway, shutting off the engine, or unlocking the door. He stood in the middle of the living room like a man who had wandered into someone else’s house by mistake.
It was too quiet.
The house still held her scent in the corners—lavender and lemon, something warm and clean that used to wrap around him like a second skin. Now it clung like a ghost.
He walked to the kitchen in a daze, opened a cabinet, then closed it again. He wasn’t hungry. He didn’t know what he was.
He dropped into a chair and put his head in his hands.
Isabella’s voice still rang in his ears.
"You’re just like your father."
It had been a slap. A diagnosis. A prophecy fulfilled.
Daniel had spent his whole life trying to unwrite the man who raised him. And somewhere along the way, he had traced his footsteps anyway—every selfish impulse, every cowardly excuse. He’d just… dressed it better. Told himself he was different because he cried about it afterward.
But Hannah didn’t need a man who wept after hurting her.
She needed someone who didn’t cause the wound in the first place.
His stomach twisted.
He thought about that first night—when she found out. The way her voice had cracked. The way her whole body had gone still like something inside her had snapped clean in half.
He’d done that.
He broke her.
And he kept calling it a mistake, like that made it smaller, like that word could shrink the devastation into something manageable.
But it wasn’t small. It was everything.
His hands shook as he stood, wandering toward the bedroom. Their bedroom. The bed still made. The pillow she hadn’t slept on in weeks.
He sank down on the edge and stared at the wall. Not seeing it.
He remembered her laughter. Her morning voice. The way she used to hum when she made tea. The way she’d once pulled him close and whispered, "We’re going to be the kind of old couple everyone rolls their eyes at."
He wanted that.
He wanted that future. But he had set fire to it. With his own two hands.
He lay down across the comforter, curled in on himself like a child, chest burning with grief that had nowhere to go.
He wanted to go back.
He wanted to rewind time and slap the younger version of himself who thought a passing thrill could somehow fix the feeling of being lost. Who thought it would be harmless, private, containable.
He wanted to scream.
But the house wouldn’t care.
The walls wouldn’t echo.
And Hannah wouldn’t hear him.
She wasn’t coming back.
And maybe the worst part—maybe the part that really tore him in half—was the truth that had bloomed, brutal and undeniable, inside the silence that followed Isabella’s words:
He wouldn’t have taken himself back either.