Chapter 12 #2
But her light. Her belief in him. Her stubborn, fragile, unconditional belief in a man who never deserved her. Adair sat in the dark a long time after that.
How did he get here?
From happiness to loneliness?
When the fuck did their marriage go so left that he thought another woman could fix what was broken between them? Where he thought staying away would make him feel like less of a failure?
NEW YORK, FOUR YEARS AGO
The apartment was quiet except for the faint whirr of the box fan in the living room window and the distant echo of Sabine’s voice.
Adair had just walked in from a late night at the library.
Case notes tucked under his arm, tie loose, collar unbuttoned.
He didn’t call ahead, just needed to see his family.
He missed her. Missed Ade. The weight of everything had been getting heavier by the day, but coming home to them was supposed to be the relief.
He paused in the hallway, hearing her voice carry softly from their bedroom. She was on the phone—FaceTime, maybe. Laughing lightly at first but then her tone shifted. His name hadn’t come up, yet something in him stopped cold anyway.
“I hate it here,” she said. The words didn’t come with venom. They came like confession. Worn and exhausted. Adair froze just outside the doorway, back against the wall. “I hate it in New York. I feel like I’m… shrinking,” she said. “Like I’m disappearing a little more every day.”
Adair knew that voice. The one she used when she was trying not to cry. The one she used when she didn't want to be overheard. It cracked right in the center, right at the edge of breaking.
Narri was on the other end. He could recognize her cadence even from the faint speaker distortion. “Bitch, come home then. Ain’t nobody making you stay in that shoebox with them pigeons and trains and overpriced ass groceries.”
Sabine chuckled, but it was thin. “I can’t just leave, Nar,” she said. “This is Adair’s shot. His dream. His whole life is here right now.”
“Okay, but what about your life?”
Silence.
And then Sabine whispered something that gutted him.
“I regret not putting up more of a fight. I just…blindly followed a man I barely knew.”
Adair’s chest tightened. The words hit like a blow.
Parthenia's voice joined in gently. “Bine...I know when I asked back when y’all first got married if it felt too fast, you got a little offended…but if I asked you that again…how would you answer now?”
There was a long pause.
Sabine’s voice dropped even lower. “I don’t regret my husband.
Or my son. I love them with everything in me.
But…I do wish I could’ve waited just a little longer.
Just to find me more. I’m only twenty-two.
Now I’m pregnant again,” she said with a bit of disdain.
“I feel like I’m being erased. I hate this. ”
Adair’s knees nearly buckled. He’d been so focused on providing, on proving himself, on being everything for her, that he hadn’t stopped to ask what she needed for herself.
He thought taking her with him was love.
He thought building a life together—school, baby, marriage—meant she was with him in all of it.
But maybe she hadn’t been. Maybe she had followed him because there wasn’t room for her own direction. Maybe he had mistaken proximity for partnership.
He leaned back against the wall, stared up at the ceiling, blinking fast. His vision blurred and it wasn’t from exhaustion this time.
In that moment, Adair felt like nothing.
Like he’d dragged her into this life, mistaking obligation for love.
Like he’d caged the carefree, radiant woman he fell in love with and called it a home.
He thought about the first version of Sabine—the one who made corny ass jokes, danced badly in the kitchen barefoot, sent him poems at 2am just because she felt something and had to say it.
She was alive. Unapologetic. Sure of herself.
Now? She cried behind closed doors and whispered her needs into phones instead of to him and that wasn’t her fault.
It was his.
That night, he didn’t walk into the bedroom. He didn’t tell her he overheard. Didn’t hold her or ask what she needed or say I’m sorry. He just stood in the hallway, alone in the dark, realizing he might’ve broken something without ever lifting a hand.
That was the moment their marriage changed. Not with a slam or a scream but with a whisper she didn’t know he heard.
And that whisper?
It gutted him because it didn’t come from resentment. It came from weariness. From the quiet kind of truth people only say when they think no one is listening.
And he had listened.
Every word.
From the hallway, Adair finally realized the life he built with her might’ve started from love but somewhere along the way, it became a map she didn’t draw and all this time, he thought he was the provider. The protector. The husband who sacrificed for his family.
But maybe all he’d done was cage her comfort and call it duty. Maybe he hadn’t been the safe place she thought he was and once that thought cracked open, it never resealed.
That was the moment the insecurity of the husband and father he thought he was began to seep deep into his ego. Not because she’d said anything cruel but because she hadn’t meant for him to hear it and now he couldn’t unhear it.
Now it lived in him.
Festered.
Gnawed at the part of him that once believed he was a good man. A good husband. A present father.
Because how good could he be if the woman he loved was drowning in the life he dragged her into? A life she hated. Regretted.
That memory crept up sometimes when he least expected it and today, sitting in his office with nothing but silence and regret to keep him company, it came back like smoke through a cracked door.
The sound of her voice on that call.
The way she said, “I regret not putting up more fight.”
Adair could feel it again. That same sting. That same punch to the gut. He leaned forward at his desk, elbows on his knees, face in his hands. It wasn’t the kiss with Corrine. It wasn’t the night Sabine left. It wasn’t even the hospital.
All of that was the aftermath of that moment.
It was that moment.
That was when he knew something in their marriage had already started to die. Quietly. Softly. Without warning.
And he’d let it.
He never brought it up. Never told Sabine he overheard. Never used it to explain away his own unraveling because he wasn’t a coward and he wasn’t gonna claim a cop-out. Especially not with a woman who’d suffered more in their marriage than he ever could.
Sabine had carried it all. The weight. The children. The disappointment. The grief and still tried to keep the roof from caving in.
And Adair? He let her.
He’d built their life with ambition and good intentions, but somewhere along the way, she became collateral and now, no matter how many times he replayed it, how many times he rewound the clock in his mind—he still ended up here.
Alone. Sitting in a glass tower she helped him build, without the one person it was all supposed to be for.
Adair closed his eyes, the guilt heavy as lead in his chest. That moment—that call—had haunted him every day since and the worst part? He still hadn’t figured out how to forgive himself for it. How to somehow make up for failing at every single thing he’d set out to do with her by his side.
He’d wanted to be the man who changed her life for the better. The man who protected her, uplifted her, gave her a future she could thrive in. A future her father thought he couldn’t provide.
But what kind of man builds a future so bright that his wife has to dim herself just to live in it?
He thought about how young she was back then.
Twenty-two. New city. No tribe. No plan except him and he’d been so blinded by what he thought was love—what he knew was love—that he never stopped to ask if the dream he was chasing made room for hers too.
He just expected her to follow and she did. Even when she was breaking. Even when the pieces of her were too small to name.
Sabine followed.
Adair turned toward the window, the city stretching out before him like a reminder that ambition had its cost and he’d paid it.
In trust.
In closeness.
In the woman who used to curl up in his arms like home.
That phone call hadn’t just shifted something in their marriage. It cracked the mirror he’d been looking in for years.
And every version of himself since then—husband, father, provider, liar—had felt a little less whole. There was no way to rewrite the past. No way to undo what was already lost.
But maybe, just maybe…
Adair could still figure out how to be the kind of man she didn’t regret choosing—even if she never chose him again.