Chapter Fifteen Julian #2
I feed myself the thin, bitter comfort of denial as I walk to the car. I tell myself she’s being dramatic. She’ll realize what she’s throwing away. She just needs time to cool off before she comes to her senses.
The house is waiting patiently for me when I pull into the driveway. The windows are dark, sightless eyes. The door is locked. I sit in the car for a long time, the engine off, the silence pressing in from all sides.
I enter and close the door behind me. Wait for something to happen.
A sound. A movement. The smell of dinner cooking because she always started early, knowing I hated eating late.
Nothing.
Just the dead air of a place that used to be lived in.
The house has been empty for months. I have been living in it alone, sleeping in the bed we used to share, eating at the table where she used to sit across from me. But the air has never felt this heavy. The house holds its breath, waiting for something that will never return.
I walk into the kitchen first, guided by muscle memory.
The kitchen was her place. She moved through it—chopping, stirring, wiping down the counters. Morning after morning, evening after evening, she kept everything running. She was the engine. I just lived inside the warmth she generated.
The counter is bare.
I stand in the doorway and stare at it. The pale granite is polished.
The surface gleams. But there is nothing on it.
No cutting board waiting. No lunch containers stacked neatly beside the sink, drying.
No small bowl of fruit, the one she kept stocked with those waxy red apples she knew I’d grab just to have something to crunch on in the car.
I open the refrigerator.
The light is harsh. The bulb seems brighter, more violent than it used to be.
Or maybe it is the same, and the emptiness of the space makes it feel harsher.
There is nothing inside that isn’t depressing.
A carton of milk I bought in a fit of grocery store panic.
A loaf of bread. A few jars of condiments—crusty, solitary objects.
No labeled Tupperware. No foil-wrapped plates of leftovers she’d save in case I dragged some colleague home or had a midnight craving.
I never thanked her. I never noticed the refrigerator brimming with her attention until only my milk remained.
I close the refrigerator and stand there for a moment, my hand still on the handle, waiting for something. For her to appear in the doorway, wiping her hands on a towel, asking what I want for dinner.
She doesn’t appear.
Of course she doesn’t. She hasn’t been here for months. Why do I keep expecting her to be here?
Because this is her place. This is where she belongs.
The bedroom is worse.
There is nothing for me here. There hasn’t been for months. Still, my body carries me forward, toward the space where she once lay beside me in the dark. I find myself reaching for a ghost, my fingers twitching for the contact of her skin, only to brush clumsily against dry air.
The bed is made. Wrongly.
Before, the sheets were smooth, the pillows fluffed, the duvet pulled to its proper place on the mattress. Now the bed holds nothing of her. No dent where her head had rested. No wrinkle where her body had curved. Just flat fabric and empty space.
A hotel bed.
I sit on the edge of the bed. The mattress is firm. It’s a good mattress. I paid for it.
She left.
She actually left.
I lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling. There’s a small crack in the plaster near the corner. I’ve never noticed it before. How long has it been there? How many things have I not noticed?
I think about the first time I brought her here. She had stood in the doorway of this bedroom, her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes moving slowly across the walls, the windows, the closet. She looked… grateful. That’s what I thought. Grateful.
Now I wonder if she was already calculating how to leave.
I reach for the remote. My fingers are cold, the skin around the nails dry and peeling. I need a noise to pierce through the silence. The silence, which has grown on the walls of the house thick and furry, like mold on a piece of forgotten fruit.
The screen flickers on. The noise crashes in—bright, vacuous, jabbering about weather I don’t care about and sports I never followed. A car commercial blares. The sound doesn’t fill the emptiness. It claws at it. Invasive and shrill.
I switch it off.
The silence rushes back, thicker than before, punishing me for daring to fill it.
I check my phone.
The screen glows. The light is cold, neon blue, the colour of electronic screens and loneliness. No notifications. No missed calls. Just the time, glowing in the dim room.
I open our old chat thread and scroll. Her messages stack one after another, each a small errand wrapped in formal distance.
Picked up your dry cleaning.
I couldn’t find the ingredients for the dish you wanted. I’ll check tomorrow.
Will you be late today?
Her messages are cordial, bloodless things.
I scroll past them quickly. I don’t need to see them again.
I remember. I never felt the need to reply.
I remember turning the phone face-down, silencing her with a flick of my wrist, letting her inquiries hang in the air.
I didn’t need to answer. I knew she would be there when I got home, because she was always there, because her presence was a given.
I throw the phone on the bed.
Kieran’s face surfaces from the dark. He stood between us.
Easy. Confident. Uninvited but unbothered.
His body occupied the space as if he had always belonged there.
He’d called her ex-wife without a flicker of hesitation.
He’d smiled when he said it, his lips curling back as if the word tasted good.
He probably thinks he’s won. Thinks she’s his now.
She’s not his. She’s mine. She just forgot for a while.
But she’ll remember. When the new life stops feeling new.
When the café shifts, and the cheap apartment with peeling wallpaper and secondhand furniture stops feeling like freedom and starts feeling like what it is—a step down.
A long, humiliating way down from the life I built for her.
I had given her everything. A house. Money. A future.
He can’t give her any of that. What does he have? A job pouring coffee. A rented room somewhere with thin walls and ugly flooring. A smile that probably works on women who don’t know better.
But Nora knows better. She lived better. She slept in soft sheets and ate food she didn’t have to worry about paying for. She’ll get tired of scraping by. Of counting coins. Of coming home to a place that isn’t hers.
She’ll come back.
She has nowhere else to go.
My stomach grumbles, so I push off the bed and head to the kitchen. I hired a housekeeper months ago, but I told her to take today off. I just couldn’t tolerate the idea of another person breathing the air in this house. Not today.
I open the refrigerator again, as if something might have changed in the last ten minutes, as if a labeled container might have materialized on the shelf where her care used to live.
There is nothing.
I make dinner. Or I try.
The knife is too dull, or maybe it’s my grip.
The cutting board slides against the counter.
I chop the garlic too fast, too careless, the pieces are a mess—uneven, jagged, some minced into a bitter paste, others still nearly whole, and a few simply crushed into flat, weeping discs under the side of the blade.
I don’t know how she did it. I watched her a thousand times.
Absent-mindedly. Like one watches the television.
Her knife moved like it was part of her hand, quick and sure and quiet.
I never asked her to teach me. I never thought I would need to know.
I burn the garlic. The oil is too hot. I didn’t wait long enough, or I waited too long—I don’t know the difference. The garlic turns brown, then black, curling at the edges. The pan smokes. The smell is acrid, and I curse under my breath and scrape the whole thing into the trash.
The trash is full. She used to take it out. Every Tuesday, I think. Or Wednesday. I never paid attention. It was just a part of the house’s invisible duties, a task that performed itself while I was sleeping or working or thinking about more important things.
I munch on a piece of bread while standing at the counter.
The bread is dry. It tastes like nothing. I chew and swallow and chew and swallow, and I don’t sit down because there is no point. The table is set for one. The chair across from me is empty. The plate that would have been hers is still in the cabinet, stacked with the others, untouched.
I leave the plate in the sink.
She used to wash my dishes. Every night, after I went to bed, she would stand at the sink and clean up after me.
Now the plate sits there. And no one is coming to wash it.
I go to bed. The sheets are cold. Her pillow is still there, on her side, untouched. I don’t move it.
She’s broken. That’s the only explanation. The only conclusion a sane mind can reach. Something is wrong with her. Has been for a long time. Maybe since before we met. Maybe that’s why she was so quiet, so distant, so impossible to reach.
I tried. I really tried. I asked about her day. I bought her flowers. I apologized for the affair—more times than she deserved.
And she still left.
So the problem must be her. Not me. Her.
I close my eyes. Sleep doesn’t come. The silence presses against my ears, heavy and insistent.
She’ll regret this. One day, she’ll wake up and realize what she threw away.
The house. The security. The man who loved her, who actually saw her when she was nothing and carved out a space for her in a world she wasn’t built for.
I provided everything. Everything she ever needed.
I was the floor, the walls, and the roof. And I won’t be there.
I’ll have moved on. I’ll have found someone better. Someone who appreciates me. Someone who isn’t broken.
I hate her for leaving. I hate her for making me feel like this. I hate her for being the one to walk away when I should have been the one to let her go.
She didn’t win. She didn’t win anything.
She lost. She lost me.
I will not miss her. I will not think about her. I will not wonder where she is or what she’s doing or whether she’s happy.
She doesn’t deserve my thoughts.
She never did.
I close my eyes.
She’ll be back.
She has to.
There’s nothing else out there for her.
And if she doesn’t come back—
No. She will.
She’ll find the world too loud, too dirty, and too difficult, and she’ll crawl back to the only place she belongs to.
She always did what I wanted.
I keep telling myself that until sleep takes me.