All The Ways You Taught Me to Love

CHAPTER 3 – THE ART OF DENIAL

Denial is a strange thing. It doesn’t erase the truth; it simply dresses it in softer clothes—

linen instead of steel, cotton instead of wire— so you can hold it for a little longer without cutting your hands open.

Before denial wrapped itself around Mara’s throat like silk, there was a moment so sharp, so absolute, that the world she loved split cleanly down the middle.

It began with a notification. A single vibration on her phone.

Unknown number. One attachment.

She clicked it without thinking— a reflex, nothing more.

The video opened in full brightness, and for one suspended heartbeat

she didn’t understand what she was seeing.

Shadows first. Movement blurred by low light. A man’s hand bracing against a wall— a hand she’d held a thousand times, a hand she could recognize even in the dark.

Then the sound.

A soft laugh. A breathy whisper. Loud moans. A voice she knew like her own name.

Lian.

Mara’s vision tightened. Her grip on the phone faltered.

A second voice followed—deeper, familiar, threaded with the intimacy of someone who had already broken every boundary.

Gabriel.

Her husband.

And then— not the act, not the bodies—

but the way he said her name. “Lian…” Not playful. Not distant. Not careless. Seductive but tender.

The kind of tenderness he hadn’t used with Mara in months. The kind of tenderness she thought belonged only to her.

The camera shook slightly, catching fragments: the curve of Lian’s shoulder, Gabriel’s wedding ring catching the dim light, the way their silhouettes leaned toward each other

with the ease of people who had done this before. Two people moaning loudly and f*****g each other like there’s no tomorrow. Sweat visibly dropping on each of their bodies.

Mara didn’t breathe. Her heart didn’t race— it stopped.

Completely. Quietly. As if stunned into silence. She didn’t drop the phone. She didn’t scream. She didn’t cry. She simply stood there, frozen in the doorway of her own living room, watching the two people she loved most in the world trace the outline of each other’s bodies with a familiarity she had never questioned.

The betrayal wasn’t in the movements— it was in the sounds.

Lian’s moan to an almost whisper: “Love…”

Gabriel’s low reply, soft enough that Mara had to lean in, as if the truth didn’t want to hurt her loudly. “I love you so much, Lian. I can’t live without you.”

“I Love You”. Three words that once rebuilt her. Three words that now destroyed her.

The video ended abruptly. No explanation. Anonymous sender. No mercy.

Mara stared at the black screen for a long, terrible moment before her knees gave out and she sat on the floor, not out of weakness, but because gravity itself seemed to change. Her world, now heavier, tilted.

She couldn’t tell where the room was anymore. Where her body was. Where her life was supposed to go.

All she knew was this:

There are truths that break you instantly, and there are truths that unfold like slow poison. This was both. And denial— faithful, foolish denial— rushed in like a blanket thrown over a fire, too thin to smother, too soft to save.

She whispered to herself, because silence was unbearable:

“No… maybe it’s edited. Maybe I didn’t see it right. Maybe…”

The lies came easily. The way drowning hands reach for air. But something inside her— something small and trembling— knew.

Her life had ended the moment she pressed play. Everything after this was simply the slow realization that the person she loved had already left her

long before she ever knew.

For the next few days, Mara lived like a woman balancing on the thin edge of a blade— carefully, quietly, pretending she wasn’t bleeding.

She moved through her routines like a ghost trained to mimic the living. She made breakfast.

She answered emails. She sat through meetings where voices sounded like they came from underwater. She smiled when the world expected her to. She nodded on cue. She laughed at jokes she barely heard.

To anyone watching, nothing had changed. But inside her, everything had shifted— the way air shifts before an earthquake, too still, too quiet, a silence that feels like the kind that precedes destruction. Denial didn’t protect her.

It only delayed the implosion. It allowed her to exist on the edge of a blade without realizing she was already bleeding. Because that’s the thing about denial: It lets you believe you’re safe right up until the moment you’re not.

On Wednesday morning, the world delivered its first fracture.

Mara walked into the kitchen and found Gabriel already dressed, ready to step into a life she no longer recognized.

His shirt was crisp. His sleeves rolled neatly. His cologne lingered in the air—sandalwood, citrus… and something new she couldn’t name. A scent that didn’t belong to her, didn’t belong to them.

“You’re early today,” she said lightly, pouring coffee as if her hands weren’t suddenly trembling.

“Meeting with a client,” Gabriel replied. “Big project.”

“Do I know them?”. He paused—just a moment, just a breath— but it was enough.

“Ah… new client. You don’t him.”

It wasn’t the words that betrayed him. It was the lack of eye contact, the way his gaze slid sideways as if truth had become too heavy to look at directly. Gabriel used to meet her eyes even when asking mundane questions like:

“What do you want for dinner?” or “Do you think this shirt matches my tie?”

But now? He looked everywhere except at her. At the counter. At the window. At the floor. At anything that wasn’t guilt.

Mara felt something cold settle inside her chest— a small grief, so small it could be mistaken for a sigh.

She handed him his mug with a smile she summoned from a place she didn’t know existed. “Good luck.”

He kissed her cheek.

For a moment, she thought about closing her eyes and pretending. Pretending it felt the same. Pretending she still lived in the version of her life where love was whole. But she didn’t. She kept her eyes open. Because pretending had begun to hurt more than knowing.

That afternoon, Mara crossed a threshold she never imagined she would:

She opened the chat thread between Gabriel and Lian.

Not because she wanted to. Not even because she was ready. But because suspicion is a seed that grows even in the most carefully tended gardens.

She searched for messages. There were none. Not even an accidental emoji. Not even an archived thread. The space was empty— too empty, unnaturally empty, a wound scrubbed clean.

Mara stared at the blank screen, feeling a quiet panic bloom beneath her ribs. Lian never deleted messages. Gabriel hated clean chats. This was deliberate. This was erasure. This was a truth hiding behind a locked door.

“Maybe… they cleaned their chats,” Mara whispered.

The lie felt sour in her mouth.

She said it again. Quieter. Less convincing. But denial, even at its weakest, still reaches for your hand.

The next day, Mara met Lian for dinner. Lian arrived late, flustered, smiling too brightly— a performance of happiness rather than the real thing.

“Sorry Queen! Traffic was insane,” she said, hugging Mara with a warmth that felt almost desperate.

Mara inhaled. Not floral. Not sweet. Sandalwood. Citrus. The same scent lingering on Gabriel’s shirt that morning.

Her blood froze, but her face didn’t show it.

“New perfume?” she asked casually, stirring her soup as if her heartbeat wasn’t pounding in her ears.

Lian blinked, startled— a half-second too long, a half-second too revealing.

“Oh! Uh—yes! Uhm.. what was that perfumes name again? Geez.. I forgot. But it was worth buying!”

Lie. Thin. Brittle. Trembling.

Lian filled the rest of the meal with noise— stories, jokes, dramatic reenactments— anything to keep silence away. Because silence is where truth echoes. Silence is where guilt grows a voice.

Lian’s phone suddenly rang. Lian picked up her phone to see who it was.

“Uhmm .. excuse me for a minute, Queen. I’m going to take this call. It’s urgent.” And she headed outside.

And then, during a call she took outside, Mara saw it through the window: The softened eyes. The tucked hair. The lowered tone.

“Love…” Lian whispered into the phone.

The word didn’t explode. It dissolved something inside Mara— quietly, slowly, the way salt dissolves in water.

She closed her eyes. She didn’t want confirmation. Her heart already knew. And somehow, this knowing hurt more than the video— because videos can be blamed on angles, on misunderstanding, on bad lighting or illusions. But a whispered “love”?

That is a confession in its purest form.

That night, Mara returned home. Gabriel was on the couch, half-lit by the warm, deceptive glow of their living room lamp. “Mara, love” he said, sitting up. “You’re home late.”

“Dinner with Lian.” Mara answered shortly.

Gabriel stiffened. He tried to hide it. He almost succeeded.

“How… is she?” he asked too casually.

Mara lowered herself onto the couch beside him.

“She seems… happy,” she said softly. “Very happy.”

Gabriel nodded. Swallowed. Pretended not to bleed. Pretended she wasn’t watching him unravel.

Mara leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder the way she always had— not for comfort, not out of habit— but to test how much of him she still recognized.

He froze. Then relaxed, slowly, carefully. His arm wrapped around her.

“Love,” he whispered, “I’m here.”

And there it was— the cruelty of betrayal distilled into a single truth:

A person can hold you with the same hands that held someone else hours earlier. A person can love you with the same mouth that whispered “I love you” to someone else. A person can stay beside you even while choosing another.

Mara didn’t cry that night. Tears are honest, and she wasn’t ready for honesty.

Instead, she memorized the feeling of Gabriel’s arms— the warmth, the weight, the illusion of belonging. She collected them the way people collect artifacts— not to keep, but to preserve the memory of what once was. Because some endings don’t arrive with noise.

Some endings appear quietly— in a scent, in a lie, in a blink too long, in a truth too soft to scream.

Denial wasn’t comfort anymore. It was slow poison. And Mara felt it spreading through her bloodstream, one ordinary day at a time, softly, silently, inevitably.