EPISODE3
428 Words
A text.
From Marcus's personal number. Not his work number. His personal one.
Four words.
I remember the photograph.
Sera stared at the screen for a long time. Her reflection looked back at her from the dark glass of the fire exit door — pale, still, eyes wide.
She locked the phone.
Slid it back into her bag.
Walked to the elevator and pressed the button for the ground floor.
Her hands were completely steady.
Her mind was not.
Inside the hospital room, Dominic stared at the ceiling.
The door had been closed for four minutes. He knew because he had counted.
Slowly, with the kind of careful deliberateness that looked exactly like a man with nothing to hide, he reached over and turned off the bedside lamp. The room went dark except for the glow of the monitors.
He lay back.
The warm, open expression he had shown her, the unguarded face, the careful questions, the almost-smile, slid away like a mask being set down on a table. What replaced it was quieter. Harder. More familiar.
His jaw tightened.
He remembered everything.
He remembered the cold dinners. The silences. The way she had stopped reaching for him, not all at once but gradually, the way light fades, so slowly you don't notice until the room is dark and you're sitting in it alone wondering when that happened.
He remembered the night six months ago when he had stood in the doorway of her studio and watched her paint for twenty minutes without her knowing he was there, and thought: I am losing her. I have already lost her. And I did this.
He remembered calling his lawyer eighteen months ago and filing the papers himself, convinced that leaving was the kindest thing he could do for her. Then withdrawing them two weeks later because he had watched her sleep and thought: she is extraordinary and I have failed completely to deserve her and I am not ready to accept that.
He remembered three days ago, opening an email from Marcus with the subject line: She filed. Reading it twice. Sitting very still for a moment. Then getting in the car.
His hands went still on the blanket.
This is your last chance, he told himself. The only one you get. Don't waste it.
If pretending he had forgotten the last three years was the only way to buy himself time — time to show her who he could be instead of who he had been, then he would forget.
He closed his eyes.
And began the lie.
- Writer
