9. Dylan
— ? —
Dylan
The award has more weight than I expected. Solid in my hands, meant to impress.
I turn it over as the car takes me home, letting the streetlights catch the surface. Best Director. The highest honor the industry can bestow, the validation of everything I’ve worked toward since I was a nobody from nowhere with dreams too big for my circumstances.
It should be euphoric. I should be calling everyone I know, celebrating until dawn, soaking in this moment that I’ve chased for my entire career.
Instead, I keep thinking about Selene’s face when I thanked Claudette.
The way she looked at me. Or rather, the way she didn’t look at me. Her gaze fixed somewhere in the middle distance, her expression carefully blank in that way she gets when she’s trying not to feel something.
I shake off the thought. She’s probably just tired. It was a long night, and she left early, and I’ll make it up to her tomorrow. We’ll have breakfast together, and I’ll show her the award, and she’ll smile that real smile, the one that makes my chest ache, and everything will be fine.
Everything will be fine.
The mantra repeats in my head as the car pulls into our driveway, but something feels off. The house is completely dark. Not a single light in any window, not even the porch light Selene always leaves on when she knows I’m coming home late.
“Sir?” My driver glances at me in the rearview mirror. “Everything all right?”
“Fine.” I gather my things, the award, my phone, the jacket I shed somewhere during the after-party. “Just tired. Thanks for the ride.”
I step out into the cool night air and stand for a moment, staring at the dark facade of our home. The windows stare back at me, looking hollow. A chill runs down my spine that has nothing to do with the temperature.
She probably just went to bed early, I tell myself. She said she had a headache.
But Selene always leaves lights on. Even when she goes to bed before me, she leaves the kitchen light burning, a small beacon to guide me home. The total darkness feels wrong.
Ominous.
I let myself in through the front door, and the silence engulfs me immediately.
“Selene?”
My voice echoes through the empty foyer. No response. No soft footsteps coming to greet me. No sign that anyone is home at all.
“Baby? I’m back.”
Still nothing.
The award suddenly feels ridiculous in my hands, a gaudy trophy for a life that’s starting to feel hollow. I set it down on the entry table and move deeper into the house, flicking on lights as I go.
Our living room is empty.
Silence fills the kitchen, no dishes in the sink, no evidence that anyone’s been here in hours.
Even the office is dark and silent, my awards gleaming on their shelves, mocking me.
The panic is building now, a cold pressure in my chest that makes it hard to breathe. I take the stairs two at a time, telling myself I’m overreacting, she’s just asleep, she’s just in the bathroom, she’s just…
The bedroom door is open.
The lights are off, but moonlight streams through the windows, illuminating a scene that stops me dead in my tracks.
The closet doors are standing open. Selene’s side looks almost ransacked, a few hangers askew, empty spaces where some clothes used to hang, shoe boxes toppled and scattered across the floor. It looks like someone packed in a hurry.
It looks like someone left.
“Selene?” Her name comes out strangled. “Baby, where are you?”
I fumble for the light switch, and when the room floods with brightness, the full picture becomes clear.
Her jewelry case sits on the vanity, closed but conspicuously present. Her makeup is still arranged in its usual meticulous order. The bathroom counter, visible through the open door, still holds her skincare products and perfume bottles.
But the personal things, the photos she kept on her nightstand, the books she was reading, the small mementos she’d collected over the years, those are gone.
And on the small table by the window, arranged with devastating precision, sits an envelope.
With two rings placed carefully on top.
My legs stop working.
I don’t remember crossing the room, but suddenly I’m standing in front of the table, staring down at those two rings like they’re venomous snakes coiled and ready to strike.
Her engagement ring. The one I designed with the jeweler, spending months getting every detail perfect because I wanted her to know how much she meant to me. The diamond catches the light and throws tiny rainbows across the envelope beneath it.
Her wedding band. Simple platinum, matching mine, the symbol of the life we promised to build together.
She took them off.
She left them behind.
My hands are shaking as I reach for the rings, and when I pick them up, they’re cold. Not just room temperature cold, actually cold, as if they’ve been sitting here for hours, waiting for me to find them.
How long has she been gone?
How long have I been celebrating while my wife was leaving me?
The envelope patiently sits there, accusatory. I don’t want to open it. I already know what’s inside, can feel it in my bones like a premonition of disaster. But I can’t not open it. I can’t stand here forever, clutching her rings, pretending that if I just don’t look, it won’t be real.
My fingers tear at the seal clumsily, and papers spill out onto the table.
Legal documents. Official letterhead. Language I recognize from industry contracts but never thought I’d see applied to my own marriage.
Petition for Dissolution of Marriage
The words blur and sharpen, blur and sharpen, as my vision swims with something that might be tears or might be shock or might be my entire world collapsing in on itself.
Divorce papers.
She’s filed for divorce.
A smaller piece of paper flutters free from the legal documents, and I snatch at it with desperate fingers. Selene’s handwriting covers the page, that elegant, distinctive script that used to fill the margins of my early scripts with notes and suggestions and love.
Dylan,
You don’t have to choose between your work and your wife anymore.
Let us free ourselves from the cage we keep binding ourselves into.
I hope you find what you’re looking for.
Selene
That’s it. That’s all she wrote. No accusations, no anger, no lengthy explanation of everything I did wrong. Just these few devastating sentences, written in a hand that didn’t shake, signed with a name that no longer includes mine.
My legs give out.
I hit the floor hard, the impact jarring through my knees and up my spine, but I barely feel it.
The rings are still clutched in one fist, the note crumpled in the other, and I’m staring at the divorce papers spread across the table above me like the scattered evidence of a life I didn’t know I was destroying.
You don’t have to choose between your work and your wife anymore.
But I never wanted to choose. I never thought I had to choose. I thought I could have both. The career, the success, the awards, and Selene waiting at home, loving me, supporting me, being there when I finally had time to turn around and see her.
I thought she understood. That I was making her happy. I thought…
What did I think? That she would wait forever? That she would keep accepting less and less of me until she was surviving on nothing but crumbs and promises? That she would stand beside me at awards shows and smile for cameras while I thanked other women for inspiring me?
Thank you to my wife for keeping things running at home.
The words from my acceptance speech echo in my skull, and for the first time, I hear them the way Selene must have heard them.
Not as gratitude. As a dismissal.
Not as love. As an afterthought.
I reduced her to a domestic manager on live television, in front of the entire industry, while giving Claudette the credit that should have been hers.
The full horror of what I’ve done crashes over me. It’s suffocating.
My phone. I need my phone.
I scramble to my feet, patting my pockets frantically until I find it. The screen lights up, and I’m already pulling up Selene’s contact, hitting the call button before I can think about what I’m going to say.
It rings once.
Twice.
Three times.
“Hi, you’ve reached Selene. Leave a message.”
Voicemail. Did she send me straight to voicemail?
“Selene, baby, please.” My voice cracks embarrassingly, but I don’t care. “I just got home and I found… I saw the… please call me back. We need to talk about this. I know I messed up, but we can fix this. We can fix this, I swear. Just… please. Call me.”
I hang up and immediately call again.
Voicemail.
Again.
Voicemail.
Again and again and again, each call going straight to that recorded message, her voice cheerful but distant, a ghost of the woman who used to answer on the first ring.
I try texting.
Baby please answer
I’m sorry I know I messed up
Just tell me where you are
Please Selene please
The messages send but don’t deliver. Either her phone is off, or she’s blocked me, or she’s somewhere without service, and each possibility is worse than the last.
I call her mother. No answer.
Her agent. Voicemail.
Every mutual friend I can think of, increasingly desperate, but no one picks up at three in the morning, and the ones who do haven’t heard from her, don’t know where she is, are sorry but can’t help.
The phone slips from my numb fingers and clatters against the hardwood floor.
She’s gone.
She’s actually gone.
And I have no idea where she went.
I don’t know how long I sit on the floor of our bedroom.
Long enough for the moonlight to shift across the carpet. Long enough for my legs to go numb and my back to ache from the awkward position. Long enough for the first gray light of dawn to start creeping through the windows.
The award is still downstairs, abandoned on the entry table. I can’t even look at it right now. Can’t stand the thought of that golden statue, the physical manifestation of everything I traded my marriage for.
You don’t have to choose between your work and your wife anymore.