8. Brittney #2
What happened to that man?
He got comfortable. He got distracted. He let his mother’s voice get louder than his wife’s.
He started measuring success in spreadsheets instead of smiles.
He stopped dancing in the kitchen and started working through dinner.
He stopped asking about her dreams and started assuming she didn’t have any.
He lost the only thing that mattered.
I close the album. Sit in the dark closet surrounded by the evidence of everything I’ve destroyed.
The man who promised to choose her every day? He’s gone.
But maybe - maybe - I can learn to be someone new. Someone better. Someone who deserves to stand next to her again.
I don’t know how. I don’t know if she’ll let me try. I don’t know if I have the right to even ask.
But I know I can’t stay here. In this mausoleum of a penthouse, surrounded by her absence, torturing myself with what-ifs.
I need to do something. Be something. Become someone worth fighting for.
By dawn, the streets are empty. I drive to Rowe & Associates without knowing what I’m going to say.
I’m sorry feels too small.
I miss you feels too selfish.
I didn’t realize feels like the lie it is - because I did realize, didn’t I? I just chose not to look.
The firm occupies the top floor of a converted warehouse. It looks like the kind of space she always loved and I never noticed her loving. I park across the street and watch through the glass.
The guy with the compass tattoo hands her coffee. She swats his shoulder and points at something on her screen.
The sound doesn’t carry through the glass, but I see her whole body shake with it. Head thrown back. Shoulders loose. That full-body laugh I haven’t seen in years.
I used to make her laugh like that.
I used to make her do a lot of things.
Don’t.
But my brain isn’t listening. My brain is remembering every detail - the way her shirt stretches when she reaches for something on the high shelf, the curve of her neck when she tilts her head to listen, the way she tucks her hair behind her ear with ink-stained fingers.
I know those fingers. I know exactly what they feel like wrapped around-
Stop it.
I shift against the car, uncomfortable in ways that have nothing to do with the cold metal at my back. This is pathetic. Standing outside her workplace like a stalker, getting hard just watching her exist through a window.
She deserves better than this. Better than me, lurking in parking lots, wanting things I haven’t earned the right to want.
But I can’t make myself leave.
She reaches up again - that high shelf must be a problem - and her shirt rides up just enough to show a strip of skin above her waistband.
My hands remember that skin. My mouth remembers it. I used to trace the line of her hip with my tongue and feel her shiver, hear her breath catch, wait for the moment she’d grab my hair and pull me where she wanted me.
I close my eyes.
It doesn’t help. The memories are louder in the dark.
She’s sketching something on a napkin while she talks. Quick, confident lines. I’ve seen her do that a thousand times - doodling on receipts, drawing on the backs of envelopes, filling margins with tiny buildings and impossible structures.
I never once asked what she was making. Not once. Not in all the years we were married.
What kind of husband doesn’t ask?
The kind who’s too busy avoiding his own feelings to notice anyone else’s. The kind who thinks “providing” is the same as “loving.” The kind who-
She looks up.
For one frozen second, her eyes meet mine through the glass. I watch her face cycle through surprise, then something that looks like pain, then a careful blankness that hurts worse than anger would have. She turns back to her conversation. Deliberately. Like I’m not there.
I deserve that. I know I do. But watching her look through me - the way I looked through her for years - feels like a blade between my ribs. This is what it was like for her, I realize. Every day. This is exactly what it was like.
I stay another hour, watching her work, watching her laugh, watching her be someone I don’t recognize. Someone who doesn’t need me anymore.
“Can I help you?”
Helena Rowe. Arms crossed. Expression like a wall.
“I was just-”
“I know what you were doing.” She steps between me and the window. “She’s on deadline. You’re the husband who didn’t notice she was drowning. You don’t get to waltz in here because you finally figured out what you lost.”
“I just want-”
“I know what you want. You want it to be easy. You want her to see your sad face and remember she loves you.” Helena’s eyes are steel. “She built something here. Without you. You want back in her life? Earn it.”
She closes the door in my face. Inside, Brittney doesn’t even look up.
My phone buzzes that night. Helena’s name.
She checks the parking lot before she leaves. Every night. She’s looking for someone she won’t admit she’s looking for.
I stare at the message.
I’m not telling you this because I like you, she adds. I’m telling you because watching her look for you and find nothing is worse for her than seeing you. Be somewhere she can find you. In the open. Where she decides the distance.
Make it count. Or don’t bother.