The Wife He Let Go

Chapter Four: What She Left Behind

It had been three days since I switched off my phone.

Three days of letting every notification pile up unread, every name on my screen going dark except one. On the fourth morning, I finally made myself do the thing I'd been putting off since the night I walked into the rain. I needed to go back to Marcus's house and collect whatever was left of me there.

I almost didn't go. I stood by my own front door for a full five minutes that morning, keys in hand, arguing with myself the way I seemed to be doing about everything lately. Going back meant seeing him again, and some small, unguarded part of me wasn't sure I trusted myself around him yet, wasn't sure the resolve I'd built over three days of silence would survive one more conversation in that house. But leaving my things there felt like leaving a door cracked open, and I'd promised myself, standing in that dining room, that I was done leaving doors open for a man who'd already told me exactly how he wanted this to end.

I went.

The company building came into view before the house did, tall and glass and gleaming, completely unaffected by the fact that my entire life had come apart three days earlier. The security guard recognized me the second I stepped through the doors.

"Good morning, Mrs. Steele," he said, straightening the way he always did.

The name landed wrong, sharper than it should have. "Please don't call me that," I said, softer than I meant to.

"I'm sorry. Of course. I didn't mean—"

"It's alright." I made my way into the office floors I used to visit so often that half the staff still knew my coffee order by heart. I felt eyes on me as I walked, some warm, some sliding away quickly, uncomfortable. I didn't stop to talk to anyone. I kept walking until I reached the private elevator that led to the penthouse floor, and let myself in with the key I still hadn't given back.

The bedroom looked exactly the way I remembered it. Marcus's side of the closet was still full, shirts pressed and hung with the same precision he brought to everything else in his life. My side was almost empty. I stood between the two for a moment longer than I needed to, and felt the same argument from my front door start up again in my chest. This was proof, laid out in hangers and empty space, of exactly how much of this house had ever really been mine to begin with. Some part of me wanted to be angry about that. A smaller, more stubborn part of me wanted to walk out without taking anything at all, just to prove I didn't need a single thing from this room.

I packed anyway. The necklace. The cardigan. The shoes.

And then the wedding photograph, sitting on the dresser where his mother had placed it so it would be the first thing we saw every morning. I was smiling in that photograph, really smiling, the kind of smile I hadn't managed again until three nights ago in a rainstorm outside my own front door. Marcus stood beside me looking furious, his jaw tight, his eyes fixed somewhere past the camera.

I could have left it. Some tidier version of this story would have had me leave it exactly where it was, untouched, unbothered, proof that I could walk away without needing to destroy anything on my way out. But I didn't want proof of how badly I'd wanted something that had never once been real on his side, sitting on a dresser in a house I no longer belonged to.

I tore the photograph in half.

I dropped both halves onto the dresser and packed the rest quickly after that, everything folded into the single bag I'd brought.

I was halfway to the door, bag over my shoulder, when it opened before I reached it.

Marcus stood in the doorway, still in yesterday's clothes.

"I thought you'd already packed everything," he said.

"No." I managed a small smile, tired but steady. "Not everything."

He didn't move out of the doorway right away, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all. His eyes moved over my face the way they used to when he was trying to work out what I wasn't saying, and for one unsteady second I felt the truth rise in my throat again, the same truth I'd swallowed twice already this week. I could tell him right now. I could put his hand where mine kept landing without permission and watch whatever was left of his composure finally c***k.

I didn't.

I stepped past him instead, close enough to catch the familiar scent of him, close enough that some old instinct in my chest ached before I could stop it.

"If you need anything," he said behind me, "let me know."

I stopped in the hallway and looked back at him, and let that be the moment I closed the door I'd been arguing with myself about all morning.

"I never married you for money," I said. "I married you for love."

I didn't wait to see what that did to his face. I walked out, down the hallway, into the elevator, and didn't look back once the doors closed between us. Whatever I still felt standing in that hallway, I had chosen, again, to carry it alone rather than hand it to a man who'd already made his choice clear.

Behind me, in the room I'd just left, Marcus stood very still for a long moment before he noticed the torn photograph on the dresser. He picked up both halves and fit them back together in his hands, and there they were again, the two of them on their wedding day, her smile real and warm and full of a hope she no longer had any use for, his face locked in the same cold anger it had worn since the moment the photograph was taken.

He set the two halves down side by side instead of throwing them away, and stood there a long time after the elevator doors had already closed three floors below him, telling himself he was only curious about why she'd torn it, and knowing, somewhere he wasn't ready to admit to yet, that curiosity wasn't the whole truth of what had just kept his feet planted in that doorway a second too long.