Always Yours (Wade Legacy #3)

Prologue

alyssa

I used to take up space. Not loudly, but fully. I had opinions about things that didn't matter and defended them anyway. And I had a laugh my sisters swore they could find in a crowd. I loved that about myself. Loved that I was locatable.

I used to be the kind of woman who knew what she wanted and went after it.

I don't know exactly when that woman began to fade away.

That's the thing about losing yourself slowly.

You're present for all of it and witness to none of it. I saw myself in the mirror every day, making small negotiations, telling myself that I was fine. And then I’d move on, until the light caught me differently, causing me to look at myself and think: When did that happen?

Like the way I’d discover my son Micah’s clothes didn’t fit him anymore. Somehow his growing would sneak past me in increments too small to track. Suddenly he was three inches taller and I missed all three inches while I was right there.

I missed all three inches of becoming a woman who shrank herself.

One day I was standing in my bathroom with a detangling brush in one hand, and a section of hair between my fingers, and it dawned on me that I hadn't set foot in a salon in almost three years.

Not because I couldn't afford it, but because I had stopped being someone I bothered to maintain at that level.

Who cares, I thought with a resigned shrug.

Malik didn't take me anywhere. There were no dates to dress up for.

My professional life still got the performance version of me: the blazers and the armor of competence.

But when I didn't have to work and there was no audience other than my apathetic husband, I’d simply quit showing up for myself.

I used to sit in a salon chair once a month at least, switching up my hairstyle regularly.

I had a standing manicure appointment and would put on something beautiful simply because I wanted to see myself in it.

The pre-wifed-up Alyssa was the audience for her own life.

She moved through the world with confidence, knowing she looked good and would be looked at.

That Alyssa had left me without saying goodbye.

This is what it looked like inside my six-year marriage: Slowly, he stopped taking me anywhere.

Not for my birthday, or our anniversary, or a random Friday night simply because he wanted to spend time with me.

I stopped suggesting it somewhere around year three or four because suggesting things to Malik and watching them dissolve into “yeah, we should do that,” followed by nothing, was pointless.

So I eventually decided it was better to just not ask, and not want it.

Our last Valentine's Day together, he brought home flowers. A rose-and-carnation mix in cellophane with the $16.99 ShopRite sticker still on them. He set them on the kitchen counter while I was making dinner.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” he muttered.

Translation: “Here. So you can’t say I didn’t get you anything.”

That morning, I’d sent his mother a fruit basket, a tea set, and yellow tulips, her favorite.

I'd ordered her gifts a week prior and put his name on the card. Because that's what I did as his wife. I helped maintain his relationships. Loving on his people on his behalf so seamlessly that they believed he was a man who paid attention. Of course, he’d accept their thank you calls with a warmth that almost made me forget he hadn’t lifted a finger. Never thanked me for it either.

Then there was our last Christmas. I always started months in advance with detailed lists, organizing a holiday that felt effortless to everyone else because I made it look easy.

I knew what his mother would love. I knew which specific toys his nieces and nephews were obsessed with and ordered them early.

I remembered his team members and his boss.

I took care of our mail carrier, sanitation workers, and Micah’s daycare teachers.

Not to mention everyone on my side of the family.

I held the details of other people’s lives carefully because they mattered.

That was the arrangement, though nobody ever called it that.

Malik worked. Malik came home. And I carried everything else.

The gifts, the appointments, the birthdays, everyone else’s feelings, my career, the cooking, the cleaning, the planning, the mental list a hundred items long that kept all our lives running.

He got to be a man who worked, and I got to be the reason our whole world stayed standing.

Somehow along the way we called that equal.

That Christmas, after all the wrapping paper was thrown away, and Micah was engrossed in his new toys, I looked at our tree for a gift for me. It was empty.

“Oh.” Malik glanced up from his phone. “The Peloton. That was your gift.”

The Peloton that had been sitting in our living room for two months, serving as a hook for his gym bag.

The Peloton I'd been talking myself in and out of for weeks, until a sale email in October gave me the push to take the plunge.

I was on my laptop in bed, and I didn't feel like going downstairs to grab my purse, so I asked Malik for his debit card from his nightstand.

“I’m gonna go ahead and order this Peloton,” I told him.

“Sounds good. Get it,” he said, handing me his card.

I looked over at the Peloton almost two months later that Christmas morning, swallowed my hurt and disappointment. “Oh. Okay,” I said.

“You're welcome,” he replied even though I hadn’t actually thanked him.

Our sex life had become its own quiet grief.

He was never ready to go to bed when I was.

He'd stay downstairs, watching television, or doing whatever the alternative to coming to bed was.

Other nights he'd spend long stretches in the bathroom, and by the time he came out I was either asleep or pretending to be.

Many nights I'd wake up at one or two in the morning to him sliding in beside me, and I'd lay there understanding that was not an accident of schedule.

The question of sex settled itself automatically at that hour.

In hindsight, it was so clear. He was waiting me out.

The nights we did have sex were somehow worse than his avoidance. Because at least avoidance didn't ask anything of me. When he did show up, it was with the enthusiasm of a task to be completed.

Loneliness has a stickier texture when it's felt in the warmth of lying next to another person. You can survive regular loneliness. But to be lonely beside someone who is supposed to love and see you? That has teeth.

So I turned my desires off. Recalibrated my wants and needs to what was available to me. And taught myself not to want what I knew I wasn’t getting.

I became very good at expecting and wanting nothing.

My algorithm knew what I was missing, though.

I'd watch a video on social media, something as innocuous as a couple holding hands.

Small, ordinary evidence of people who had not forgotten each other.

A man raving over how gorgeous his girl looked after getting her hair done.

Or those scripted videos of couples dancing together, playing pranks on each other, or acting out cute day-in-the-life skits.

I ate it all up, even though it stung. The sting was the point, because it confirmed something was still alive in there. That I hadn't gone completely numb beneath my being functional.

I knew it wasn't all real. I'm a lawyer. I understand performance. But underneath the performance was something I believed was true: the impulse, the consideration, the wanting to celebrate and love on someone. The basic orientation of: you matter to me.

I’d convinced myself that I didn’t have a good enough reason to end my marriage.

That’s the thing about being unhappy in a situation where the bleeding is slow.

You have no language for it. Malik worked.

He contributed. He came home at night. He didn't hit me, didn’t yell, wasn’t overtly mean.

There was food in the fridge, and the lights stayed on, and our son Micah had everything he needed.

He doesn't see me sounds like something a woman says in a movie. It didn’t seem like enough admissible evidence to justify throwing a marriage away.

So I stayed and I got smaller. No longer mentioning things that excited me because the response from him would be indifference.

Stopped reaching for him at night because preemptive rejection was not as bad as the kind said out loud.

Stopped expecting him to ask about my day, and when he occasionally did, I gave short answers because the full ones felt like too much to offer someone who was already looking at his phone.

I never complained. I didn't nag him, or make him sit through a hard conversation about how overwhelmed and alone I was. I told myself that was strength. That a weaker woman would complain, and I was not weak. I could carry it all.

So I ignored the mirror that kept catching me off guard. This was the life I'd chosen. I should simply expect less and want less and be less and that would make the crumbs I was given feel like… enough.

And then I found out about the women.

That’s when the thing opened its mouth and screamed in my face. Because it’s one thing to make peace with a life and a man who has nothing more to give you. You can almost survive that. You can almost tell yourself, “that’s just how he is.”

But he did have it to give. He had presence and pursuit and desire and attention and all of the things he had been starving me of. He had it and was giving it elsewhere. Repeatedly. To women who were not me.

He looked at me every day and decided I wasn't worth the effort, and I had spent years agreeing with him. And now I had nothing but the knowledge that somewhere in this life I'd chosen, I’d lost the version of myself who would have known she deserved better.

The moment I knew I had to start looking for her was the moment everything fell apart.