11. Maddox Creed #3
“Taking responsibility for your actions doesn’t mean taking responsibility for things that were never yours to carry.”
I looked at her without saying anything. It sounded good in theory, but life didn’t always separate guilt that neatly. Half the time, everything blended together until it was hard to tell where one person’s mistakes ended and somebody else’s began.
She must’ve read the doubt all over my face because a small smile washed over her face.
“You can acknowledge your mistakes,” she said calmly. “Without carrying everybody else’s.”
I sat with that for a moment, turning it over in my head. Didn’t know if I agreed with her yet.
Didn’t know if I disagreed either.
Before I could sort through it, she shifted her attention across the room.
“Luciana…”
My wife’s head lifted almost immediately.
“You were very quiet just now.”
She swallowed before answering.
“I was listening.”
The therapist smiled.
“What were you thinking?”
For a second, I expected Luciana to dodge the question or soften her answer, but she didn’t.
“I was thinking about how much hurt I’ve caused.”
The honesty caught me off guard. It wasn’t the guilt that surprised me—I already knew she carried plenty of that. It was the way she said it without defending herself, without explaining her decisions, and without trying to make them sound better than they were.
The therapist nodded.
“What else?”
Luciana’s eyes found mine for the briefest second before dropping back to her hands.
“I was thinking about how much he loves his children.”
My kids had always been everything to me, and hearing her acknowledge that out loud stirred up emotions I wasn’t ready to unpack.
The therapist let the silence linger before asking her next question.
“When you think about your marriage today, what scares you the most?”
Luciana twisted her fingers together in her lap, a nervous habit I’d watched her do more times than I could count over the years. When she finally answered, her voice was so quiet I almost missed it.
“Losing him…”
Nobody reacted right away.
The room simply fell silent.
The therapist looked at me before turning her attention back to Luciana.
“Not losing the marriage?”
Luciana slowly shook her head.
“No…” A tear slipped down her cheek, and she wiped it away almost as quickly as it fell. “I’m scared of losing him.”
That landed differently.
For the first time since all of this started, she wasn’t talking about the house, our routines, or the life we’d built together. She wasn’t worried about appearances or what people would think.
She was talking about me.
The therapist leaned forward slightly.
“What does losing him look like to you?”
Luciana stared at the floor for a while. I wasn’t sure she was going to answer.
Then she finally spoke.
“It looks like him staying because of obligation instead of love.”
Fuck…
My jaw tightened.
Those words hit hard as fuck, making me uncomfortable and have to look away.
The therapist caught it immediately.
“Maddox…”
I looked back at her, already knowing I wasn’t going to like whatever came next.
She folded her hands together before asking, “When you hear Luciana say she’s afraid of losing you, what do you feel?”
I stared at the floor for a while before answering.
The easy response would’ve been anger.
The expected response would’ve been resentment.
The truth… The truth was a whole lot more complicated than that, because despite everything we’d been through… despite the lies, the hurt, and the years that had been stolen from me… I still didn’t want to hurt Luciana, and that irritated the hell out of me.
I rubbed my jaw before finally looking back up.
“I feel bad.”
Luciana’s head snapped up so fast I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye, but the therapist stayed calm.
“Why?”
I chuckled. This woman wasn’t letting me get away with a damn thing today.
“Because I know she’s hurting.” I paused, choosing my next words carefully. “I know she didn’t do all this shit because she hated me.”
Another tear slipped down Luciana’s cheek.
I noticed it and again, I pretended I didn’t.
“I know she thought she was protecting something.” The words felt heavy the second they left my mouth.
“That don’t make what she did okay, though.
It don’t make it right, and it sure as hell don’t change what happened.
” I looked down at my hands before finishing.
“But I know she wasn’t trying to destroy me either. ”
Silence settled over the room again, but this time it wasn’t uncomfortable.
It felt… different.
Bigger.
Luciana hurt me.
That was true.
She lied to me.
That was true too.
But none of it erased the fact that I’d spent the last ten years loving her. None of it erased the life we’d built together or the woman sitting across from me.
The therapist must’ve sensed the shift because she didn’t say anything right away. She gave both of us time to sit with everything that had just been said before finally breaking the silence.
“Maddox… do you still love your wife?”
The question didn’t surprise me. Honestly, I’d been expecting it. Sooner or later, somebody was going to ask.
I leaned back against the couch and looked toward the ceiling for a second. Not because I needed time to think, but because I already knew the answer.
“Yeah.”
The word left my mouth without hesitation.
Without confusion...
Without doubt…
Across from me, Luciana lowered her head, and I caught the slight shake of her shoulders.
She was crying again.
I didn’t say anything about it. I didn’t even look long enough for her to realize I’d noticed.
The therapist gave a slow nod.
“You answered that pretty quickly.”
“Because that ain’t the hard question.”
Something shifted in the therapist’s expression. She wasn’t surprised. If anything, she looked more interested.
“What is the hard question?”
The second those words left her mouth, I knew exactly where this conversation was headed. The crazy part was, I wasn’t sure I wanted to follow it there.
The therapist folded her hands together.
“Are you still in love with her?”
Fuck…
There it was.
The one question everybody had been dancing around because nobody really wanted to hear the answer.
Silence settled over the room again, but this one felt different. It wasn’t awkward or uncomfortable. It was the kind of silence that came when everybody knew something important was about to be said.
I looked down at my hands before letting my eyes drift toward the window. Anywhere but Luciana.
I couldn’t answer that question while looking at her.
Not without seeing what my answer might do.
The therapist never rushed me. She didn’t rescue me from the silence or move on to something easier.
She just waited.
Eventually, I let out a slow breath and finally answered, “I don’t know…”
Across from me, Luciana’s quiet crying stopped, and somehow the room managed to get even quieter.
“I wish I had a better answer than that,” I admitted, rubbing a hand across my jaw. “I wish I could sit here and tell you yes or no, but I can’t.”
Frustration immediately settled in my chest because I’d never been the kind of man who second-guessed where he stood. Whether it was business, family, or life in general, I made decisions. I trusted my instincts.
I didn’t sit around confused.
Yet here I was—confused as hell.
“I know I love her,” I said, my voice quieter this time. “I know I care about her. I know she’s the mother of my sons, and I know she’s been one of the biggest parts of my life for a long damn time.”
I paused, searching for the right words because this wasn’t something I could bullshit my way through.
“The being in love part…” I rubbed a hand across my jaw again, before letting out a slow breath. “That shit feels different right now.”
Luciana finally looked up. Tears still clung to her lashes, and the hurt on her face was impossible to miss. I hated seeing it. Hated knowing I was the reason for it.
The therapist gave a slow nod.
“What feels different?”
“Trust.”
The answer came before I had a chance to think about it.
That one word settled over the room because everything always seemed to circle back to it. The NDA. Gia. Nylah. The lies. The secrets.
All of it.
“I spent years believing one version of my life,” I said, lowering my eyes to the floor. “Then all that shit got ripped apart, and once it did… it changed everything.”
The therapist didn’t interrupt or challenge what I was saying. She simply listened, giving me room to work through it in my own way.
“What happens when trust is broken?”
A quiet laugh escaped me.
“Depends who you ask.”
“I’m asking you…”
Of course she was.
I leaned back against the couch and stared at the ceiling for a second, turning the question over in my head before answering.
“It changes the way you see people.”
The therapist nodded.
“Tell me what you mean.”
For the first time since we’d started talking, I looked directly at Luciana.
I saw the woman I’d shared a bed with for years, the woman I’d built a family with, and the woman who knew me better than damn near anybody else on this planet.
“When somebody breaks your trust,” I said in a low voice. “You start questioning everything. Conversations. Memories. Decisions. Shit you would’ve never thought twice about before.”
A muscle jumped in my jaw as I shook my head.
“That’s the fucked-up part.”
The therapist stayed quiet, giving me the space to keep going, and honestly, I appreciated it because none of this was easy to put into words.
“Sometimes I look at her and remember everything we’ve been through together,” I admitted. “Then other times… all I can think about is what she kept from me.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Luciana close her eyes. The hurt washed across her face almost immediately, and even though I tried not to look, I couldn’t help noticing it.
The therapist let the moment breathe before asking another question.
“Do you believe your marriage can be saved?”
I didn’t say shit, because honestly, I didn’t know the answer to that question either.