Chapter 38 #2
“You sold me.” I said it so gently that it surprised us both. “I sat in a conference room while ten lawyers negotiated what my body owed by the week, and I kept waiting for you to put a stop to it. Even the first time Kai and I… I kept thinking you’d somehow save me. But you never came.”
My voice wasn’t angry. It sounded almost kind. That’s what an old wound does. By the time you show it to the person who gave it to you, it’s all scar, and you can press on a scar without flinching.
I pressed.
“You traded me for all of this and told me you did it for me.” My hand moved, taking in the house, the view, the marble. “And now, you’ve changed your mind, and so I have to, too?” I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“Don’t say that. We can work through this. We’re the unbreakable couple.”
“Yet you broke us.”
“Amelie, I love you more than anything in this world.”
“Yet you sold me.”
He closed his eyes and blew out a breath. “I know you’re angry with me—”
“I don’t feel any anger, Stefan. Not anymore.”
He took that as his cue and moved to hug me. I stepped back before he could.
“I don’t feel anger, Stefan. But I don’t feel love for you, either.”
Pain swept over his face. “How can you say that? You are my wife.”
My wife. It sounded wrong coming from his mouth. Because the words lost meaning the moment he gave me to someone else.
“No. I am his wife. Because that’s what you wanted.”
“You’re his wife,” he agreed. “But you’re mine too.”
“No. We are nothing.”
“What are you trying to say?” His voice was low. “Are you saying—” Tears welled in his eyes. “Don’t say it, Am. I can’t live without you, baby.”
“You already proved that you can.”
His knees went.
He came down in the doorway with his arms around my waist and his face pressed into my stomach, and he cried the way I had never seen him cry, not even when his parents died.
They were unashamed tears of a wrecked man.
“Please, Am. Don’t leave me. Please. None of it means anything without you.
I’ll give him back everything, I don’t care, just don’t. Amelie, please—”
My hands rose an inch and stopped.
They knew the way to his hair. Muscle memory didn’t ask permission, it just reached.
But then I remembered washing cocaine off a seven-year-old’s fingers.
I went looking for my anger, I wanted it back, because anger would have meant something in me was still fighting for him, and I couldn’t find any.
It had burned all the way down while I wasn’t watching, and the thing standing in the ash was pity.
When I looked at him, all I felt was pity. Pity that he’d sell a family who loved him. Pity that he only appreciated us when we were no longer his to appreciate. Pity that he thought we could come back after everything he had done.
My realization was jarring—you couldn’t pity a man you were still in love with. Which meant I had to end this for good, and the only way to do that was with the cruel truth.
“Please stop, Stefan. I don’t love you anymore. All I feel for you now is pity. Because you’re rich in every way except the one that matters.”
“Don’t say that, Am.” He sobbed, his shoulders racking with sorrow. “Don’t leave me.”
I locked my arms at my sides and held them there, shaking, because touching him now would have been a lie told with my hands. It was the hardest thing I had ever done.
I didn’t know I was crying, too, until one of my tears landed in his hair. Silently, it turned out. Even my grief knew it was time to end this.
“You need help, Stefan,” I whispered. “The man I married would have thrown himself in front of a car before he let drugs within a mile of Bella. I don’t know who you are anymore.” My breath shook once. I let it. “And I can’t love someone I no longer recognize. I’m sorry.”
I had been so afraid of that sentence. For weeks, I had known that I no longer loved him, but I was horrified about admitting it even to myself.
I thought saying it would feel like a death.
I hadn’t expected the relief. Nobody warned you that the end of love came with relief, or that you’d hate yourself a little for how right it felt.
“Please, Amelie.”
I stepped back and out of his arms. And his arms let me go. Even now. Even begging.
Kai wouldn’t have let go. He would have burned the world down before he ever let me go. Once, that kind of love had terrified me. Now it was the only kind I recognized as real. The only kind I wanted.
“It’s over,” I said from my side of the threshold. “It’s been over. I’ve just been too much of a coward to say it out loud.”
Coward was the right word, and I’d earned it. I had left this marriage the moment I saw Stefan with Ruby in Beirut. But I hadn’t pulled the plug on our dying love. Because we had never known adulthood without the other. He used to be my best friend, until he became someone else and left me behind.
“You’re my wife,” he tried again, wiping his eyes with the jacket sleeve.
“I was your wife. You divorced me for money. And now we are nothing.”
I slid the glass door shut between us.
It made a small sound. That was all. It should take more than one hand and one small sound to close a door on everything we were. It didn’t.
I turned around before my face could talk me into anything else.
With feet made of lead, I headed upstairs.
I heard the boys’ shouting while playing their video game.
A small world, still intact. I wiped my face with the back of my wrist and gave myself a minute to feel all of it.
The grief. The relief. The shame about the relief.
I allowed myself a moment to grieve my relationship, and then it was over. I went into Bella’s room, found her little suitcase and packed it. Pajamas. Toothbrush. Outfit for tomorrow. My hands shook the whole time, and I let them.
My phone buzzed on Bella’s dresser.
Kai: Doctor said she’s okay. She’s asking for you.
I read it twice and felt the floor come back under me. That was what Kai did, he steadied me. I had handed him my heart in pieces, and he never dropped a single one.
Amelie: On my way to you.
I sent him the message and meant it in every possible way.
I didn’t look out at the glass door. I knew Stefan was still there, on the other side of it. I could feel him, kneeling still with his palm against the glass, waiting for me to look. And I knew that if I looked, some old, stupid muscle in me would want to open it.
So, I didn’t look.
Even though I knew Stefan would always look at us now from the other side of the glass door.