Chapter 3
360 Words
I met Ethan ten years ago at my thesis proposal defense.
I had just returned from overseas, and I watched as he, filling in for his advisor, sat in the back row with his suit crisp and every button and cuff fastened with military precision.
While others asked polite, textbook questions, he homed in on the flimsiest part of my logic like a sniper.
"Your JNS paper? Your proofs pack a punch."
A spark lit in my chest, not anger but recognition. This was not sabotage. It was a wake-up call to break free from my mental ruts.
What followed was inevitable.
We teamed up, grinding through grants, crunching data, and pulling all-nighters to polish submissions.
He would always sweep in afterward, quietly patching every oversight I had missed.
The moment I fell for him came over the most ordinary bowl of pasta.
After hours of arguing over methodology that day, he went silent. Then he wordlessly steered me to a dingy pasta joint behind the campus.
We sat at a rickety table, two starved brains too busy debating to remember our stomachs.
He picked red pepper flakes from my bowl and wiped the splattered sauce from my sleeve.
"Pick your battles, Aria," he said. "Save your fire."
In that heartbeat, his face burned into me, and I knew I would marry this man.
By then, the fractures ran too deep to map.
If this was about children, he was the one who owed me.
The year after our wedding, disaster struck at an overseas conference.
I threw myself in front of him, and white-hot agony shot through me as the blade carved into my body.
He carried my bleeding body into the ER and sank to his knees outside the surgery room, hammering his fists against his ribs as howls tore from his throat.
All night, his shaking hands clutched mine.
"Aria, I am sorry. I swear you are the only treasure I will ever need."
It was raw and devastating. I never brought up kids again.
Yet Iris was carrying his baby.
With my fingers trembling, I typed a message into my phone.
Aria: Ethan. It is over.
- Writer
