Chapter 14 #2
Every thought, every piece of the truth I had spent so long refusing to look at, left me more ashamed than the one before it.
There was no excuse waiting at the end of any of it.
No explanation that could make what I had done feel less selfish.
The more I understood, the harder it became to recognize the man I had been.
When had I become this person? When had Alessia stopped being the first person I looked for, the first person I thought about, the person whose hurt should have mattered more than anything else?
And how the hell had I managed to stop seeing her when she had been right in front of me the entire time?
That night came back to me in painful detail, but this time, it wasn’t the accident that haunted me.
It was everything that had happened before it.
Alessia had been waiting for me. She had planned a birthday party, probably hoping she could pull me out of the darkness I’d been sinking into, even if only for one night.
She had reached for me in the only way she knew how, and I hadn’t even shown up.
The team had needed me. That was what I had told myself. I had convinced myself that I owed them my time, my loyalty, every last ounce of energy I had left.
But didn’t I owe my wife more?
And when I finally came home, I couldn’t even give her a proper conversation.
All I could think about was how tired I was, how badly I wanted a shower, a bed, a few hours without having to carry anything else.
She had stood there in front of me, and all I had seen was another demand on a mind already stretched to its limit.
Now I could remember her face. The hurt she had tried to hide.
The way she had still been reaching for me even after I had given her every reason to stop.
I had been so consumed by my own exhaustion that I hadn’t noticed what I was doing to her.
What kind of husband had I been during those last few months?
No.
It went back even further.
For an entire year, my mother had been exploiting Alessia, and I hadn’t known a damn thing about it.
The fact that Alessia hadn’t told me the details didn’t absolve me.
She shouldn’t have needed to spell out every wound before I noticed she was hurting.
I was her husband. I should have known something was wrong.
I should have paid attention to the woman beside me instead of waiting for her to break badly enough for me to finally notice.
She hadn’t known the full extent of what I was dealing with, yet she had still noticed my burden.
She had seen the strain I was carrying even when I hadn’t explained it to her.
She had tried to make things easier for me, tried to stand beside me, tried to carry some of the weight when I couldn’t carry it alone.
I had been given the same opportunity to do that for her.
And I had left her to carry it alone.
When had I become this insufferable, oblivious man, so consumed by his own world that his wife could suffer right in front of him and he would still fail to see it?
How could I ever fix this?
The answer came without mercy, filling the space she had left behind.
Maybe I couldn’t.
I should let her go.
The thought hit hard enough to make my chest seize. No. Every part of me rejected it before the word had even formed. Letting her go wasn’t an option. Loving Alessia had never felt like something I could choose to stop doing. She was my wife. My home.
I had always believed I knew how to make her happy.
It was one of the things I had been most proud of, one of the few things I had never questioned.
No one could love her the way I did. No one could know her the way I did, care for her the way I did, give her the life I could give her.
I had clung to that belief through every mistake, every argument, every desperate attempt to keep her from slipping away.
It had become the excuse beneath everything.
Then the question came, crueler than the rest.
When was the last time I had actually made her happy?
The answer refused to come.
My mind reached for a memory, any memory, and found only fragments that hurt to touch.
Alessia laughing until she had to cover her mouth.
Her eyes lighting up over something small.
The warmth of her smile when she caught me watching her.
Those moments belonged to another version of our marriage, another version of me.
When had I last seen that woman in her?
My chest ached.
All I could see was the night she left.
Her tears.
The suitcase in her hand.
The look in her eyes when she had walked out of the house.
There had been no anger left in her then. No fight. No hope that I would finally understand. Just a painful acceptance that told me she had already reached the end of what she could endure.
And I had done that to her.
The truth crushed down until there was nowhere to hide from it.
I made my wife unhappy.
My heart clenched so hard it stole the air from my lungs. Heat gathered behind my eyes, and another wave of tears spilled down my face before I could stop them. The woman I had sworn to cherish—the most important person in my life—had spent so much of our marriage hurting because of me.
And on top of everything she had endured because of me, she had been forced to deal with my mother too, and then there was—
My teeth ground together.
Cassandra.
She had gone to Alessia and spouted that absolute bullshit about some supposed connection, feeding her a story that had never existed outside her own head.
Cassandra had always been there. Since we were kids, she had hovered around Liam, always somewhere nearby, always part of the same circle. I had never looked at her and seen anything beyond Liam’s younger sister. That was all she had ever been to me. Liam’s sister. By extension, my sister too.
That was it.
That had been how every relationship in my life worked.
Every relationship in my life, except for Alessia, was an obligation. Given to me, not chosen. People I had inherited through circumstance and kept through loyalty
Our fathers were friends, so naturally we became friends.
That was how it worked. One connection created another, and nobody stopped to ask whether we would have chosen each other without it.
When my father’s fall from grace destroyed everything around me, I assumed Liam would walk away too.
There was no reason for him to stay. Nothing binding him to the mess I had become.
But he stayed.
He stood beside me when leaving would have been easier. He gave me his loyalty when he owed me nothing.
So I gave him mine.
Alessia was different.
She was the woman I couldn’t imagine my life without, someone I’d reached for because something in me had pulled me toward her. Loving her had never felt like an obligation or a duty. It had been my choice.
I chose her.
And I’d hurt her.
When the company took a hit and we started losing people, Liam suggested bringing Cassandra in. While she worked for us, he would try to convince her to speak to their father. Get us the deal that could keep the company alive.
The plan worked.
We got the deal.
But at what cost?
The company survived.
My marriage didn’t.
And there was no one else to blame for that. No third party. No outside force. No circumstance I could point to and pretend had taken the decision out of my hands.
It was me.
Every mistake. Every failure. Every choice that had driven her away.
“I’m leaving because of you. And that is something you cannot fix.”
She was right.
I couldn’t fix that.
I couldn’t undo what I had done.
I couldn’t erase the hurt.
I could fix myself. But even then… why should she give me another chance? Why should she open the door again for a man who had failed her so completely? Why should she risk her peace for someone who had already shown her exactly how deeply he could hurt her?
Because I loved her?
Wasn’t that just me being selfish all over again? Using my feelings as another excuse to cling to her?
But there was one thing I could fix. Right now.
I could deal with my mother. I could end whatever delusion Cassandra was harboring.
And after that… there was one more thing I could still do for her. Give her the one thing she’d been asking me for all along.
A divorce.
She wanted out. She wanted to be free of me, free of everything our marriage had become, and after all the ways I had failed her, what right did I have to make even that harder?
The papers waited on the coffee table.
Stark. Inevitable. Final.
For months, I had clung to the idea that love meant holding on. That if I loved her hard enough, apologized enough, promised enough, there would eventually be some road back to the life we had before.
But she didn’t want that life anymore.
She wanted freedom.
She wanted peace.
She wanted a future that didn’t have my mistakes hanging over every part of it.
My hand reached for the papers, the movement sluggish beneath the weight pressing through my chest.
Her signature caught my attention first.
That familiar sweep of ink had once appeared everywhere. On notes left beside my coffee. On grocery lists stuck to the refrigerator. On little reminders I used to tease her about because she always added some unnecessary flourish at the end of her name.
It was beautiful.
And it was telling me to let her go.
My eyes burned as I stared at her name. For several seconds, I couldn’t force myself to look beyond it. I couldn’t bring myself to face the empty line waiting for mine.
A pen. I needed a pen.
My feet carried me toward our bedroom before the rest of me caught up. The hallway passed in fragments beneath me, each step dragging me closer to the one room I had refused to enter since that night.
The door stood open.
Beyond it waited the bed, the nightstand, the familiar pieces of a life that no longer felt mine.
I had stayed outside when Felicity came to collect Alessia’s clothes. Had turned away when Alessia returned home. Not once had I crossed that threshold.