CHAPTER 5 – THE DEATH OF MARA VALDEZ
1942 Words
Mara didn’t remember how she got home. One moment she was standing under the rain, soaked and shaking, whispering “no” into the storm like a broken prayer— the next, she was inside her bedroom. The same bedroom where she used to whisper dreams into a man who held her close, kissed her forehead, and made her believe she could trust him with her whole future.
Her clothes clung to her skin. Her hair was dripping. Her teeth chattered, not from the cold, but from shock. Her hands wouldn’t stop trembling.
Yet she stood there…
Frozen.
Silent.
Empty.
The kind of empty that feels like losing an organ you needed to live. The house breathed around her— soft hums, quiet shadows — but the silence between those sounds pressed onto her chest like grief sitting beside her with a hand resting over her heart.
She walked toward the mirror. What stared back at her wasn’t Mara. It was a version of her scraped raw eyes swollen, face drained, mouth quivering despite her efforts to stay composed. Her shoulders sagged as if she were carrying something unbearably heavy. She looked like the aftermath of someone else’s choices. A woman who had been loved poorly, hurt quietly, and abandoned without being told she’d already been left behind.
She sat on the edge of the bed, gripping the sheets as if they were the only thing keeping her upright. This bed…This bed once held everything good. Her laughter pressed into the pillows. Her dreams spilled across the blanket. His arms wrapped around her waist in the dark. Promises whispered into her hair. A thousand soft moments stitched into the mattress. Tonight, it held only cold air and the echo of voices that weren’t hers.
Her phone buzzed. A message from Gabriel.
GABRIEL:
Love, I’m heading home soon.
Want me to pick up food?
Food.
Her breath hitched painfully. How does a man cheat in a hotel room and then ask about dinner on the drive home?
How does he touch another woman and still call Mara “love” with the same mouth that whispers to Lian?
How does someone break the person waiting at home and still expect to be welcomed? Her hands shook so violently the message blurred.
She couldn’t type. She couldn’t breathe right. Her chest tightened like her ribs were shrinking around her lungs.
Another message.
GABRIEL:
Miss you. Can’t wait to see you.
See you.
See you.
When he said it, did he mean her? Or was he replaying Lian in his mind?
A bitter sound slipped from Mara’s throat — half-sob, half-laugh — the kind of sound heartbreak makes when it tries to escape the body.
She placed the phone face down with trembling fingers. Her body hurt. Everywhere. Inside places she didn’t know could ache. The kind of hurt that doesn’t throb — it whispers, slow and steady, until you realize you can’t remember how to feel normal anymore.
An hour later, the front door opened.
Keys.
Wet shoes.
His familiar footsteps.
“Love?” he called softly. “Are you here?”
She didn’t move.
He entered the bedroom with the ease of a man walking into safety — not realizing he was stepping into the ruins of a life he destroyed.
“There you are,” Gabriel murmured, smiling in that effortless way she once adored. “You look tired.”
Tired?
Tired was what you said when someone stayed up late. Tired was what you felt after a long week. This wasn’t tired. This was shattered.
Mara lifted her eyes toward him.
For the first time, she couldn’t overlay the man she loved with the man who stood in front of her. They were no longer the same. She didn’t see her husband. She saw the stranger in the video — the man who touched Lian with hands Mara once trusted completely.
“Are you okay?” Gabriel asked, kneeling in front of her, placing a hand on her knee. “Why are you soaking wet? Did something happen?”
His fingers on her skin felt wrong. Foreign. A violation of something sacred.
She flinched — a small, sharp movement she couldn’t control.
He noticed. His brows drew together.
“Love… what’s wrong?” Gabriel asked her with a worried face.
Everything. Everything is wrong. You broke me in ways you’ll never understand. Mara said on her mind, because the words wouldn’t leave her mouth. They pressed against her throat like stones she couldn’t swallow.
Instead, she whispered, “I’m tired.”
Her voice cracked. The kind of crack people hear when someone is simply tired or overwhelmed — but the kind that slips out from a place so deep, so hidden, so untouched by the outside world, that no one would ever know it existed unless they listened with their soul.
It was the kind of crack that doesn’t just break a word — it reveals the fracture inside a person. A quiet, trembling sound born from every disappointment she swallowed, every fear she never voiced, every moment she pretended she was fine when she was actually falling apart behind her smile. It was the sound of a heart trying to speak and breaking mid-sentence.
Gabriel reached for her hand. “Then let me take care of —”
“No.”
It came out louder than she intended. Bare. Raw.
He froze.
“I just… need to sleep,” she murmured, rising too quickly, her legs unsteady. She walked past him. Past the doorway. Past the home she thought was safe. Past the version of herself who loved him so purely it felt like innocence.
Behind her, Gabriel called out, confusion thick in his voice:
“Love? Did I do something?”
Her feet faltered. For a single moment, she almost turned around. Almost. The way people almost look back at fires that used to be their homes. But she didn’t. She kept walking.
She locked herself in the bathroom. The moment the door clicked shut, her body gave out in ways her mind had been fighting all night. Tears finally broke free – not in a loud, dramatic collapse, but in the quiet, helpless way people cry when the truth becomes too heavy to hold upright. They weren’t sobs. They weren’t screams. Just a soft, shaking unraveling — the kind of crying you don’t plan, the kind that slips out because your body has reached its limit long before your heart admits it has.
Not the dramatic kind — the soft, collapsing kind, the kind that happens when your body can no longer carry what your heart is holding. It was the kind of heartbreak that doesn’t explode — it folds you in, slowly, painfully, like your bones don’t know how to keep you standing anymore.
Her breaths came uneven, as if each inhale had to push through something sharp lodged in her chest. Her knees trembled until she had no choice but to sit on the cold tile floor, back against the door as if she needed something solid to keep herself from falling further.
This wasn’t just crying. It was release. It was grief spilling out through cracks she didn’t know she had. It was every held-back feeling finally slipping out in quiet, shaking drops
because her body could no longer carry what her heart was breaking under.
Her sobs were quiet, like she was afraid of disturbing the world outside the door. Like she didn’t want him to hear how deeply he had damaged her. She covered her mouth,
shoulders shaking, trying to keep herself from falling apart too loudly.
Some pain doesn’t demand to be witnessed. It just wants a place to exist where no one else can judge it.
She went near the sink and turned on the faucet, letting the water run just to have some kind of sound in the room — something to drown out the quiet sobs she didn’t want anyone to hear.
Her tears hit the sink in uneven drops, mixing with the water as if even her sadness was trying to disappear before she could fully face it. Each tear fell with a heaviness her chest couldn’t hold anymore, splashing against porcelain she suddenly hated for being cold, for being solid, for not breaking the way she was breaking. Her fingers gripped the counter so tightly the edges dug into her palms, sharp enough to hurt — but not sharp enough to match the pain inside her. She held on anyway.
“Why, Gabriel…?” she whispered. “Why Lian…? What did I do to deserve this?”
Her reflection blurred through fresh tears. Not a woman. A wound in human form. But beneath all the destruction in her eyes, something else flickered — faint, trembling, but alive. Not strength. Not yet. A promise. This version of Mara cannot survive this. But another version will.
Her knuckles whitened, her shoulders trembled, and for a moment she pressed her forehead against the mirror above the sink — not to see herself, but to avoid seeing herself. She didn’t want to look at the face of someone who had been replaced. She didn’t want to see the proof of what love had done to her.
So she stood there, gripping the counter like a lifeline, letting her tears fall into running water because it hurt less than hearing them hit the silence.
It took hours before her tears slowed into shaky breaths. When she stepped out, Gabriel was already asleep — back turned, breathing steady, as if the world hadn’t just split open beneath their feet. He looked peaceful. Unaffected. While Mara felt like she had died but her body hadn’t gotten the message yet.
She crawled into bed, but far from him. Her body angled toward the edge, as if even an inch closer to him might shatter whatever fragile pieces of herself she was barely holding together.
Her spine stayed rigid, the kind of stiffness that comes from trying not to cry again. Her eyes stayed wide open, because closing them meant seeing the video replay behind her eyelids in more detail than her heart could survive.
She stared at the ceiling like it held the answers to a life she no longer understood.
She waited for dawn the way wounded people do — quiet, exhausted, and desperate for a new day to feel different than the last.
As if sunrise could stitch her back together. As if light could mend what betrayal tore apart. As if morning could make her forget the sound of her best friend’s voice or the way her husband said another woman’s name with a tenderness that used to be hers.
But heartbreak doesn’t disappear with the morning light. It doesn’t care about new days or warm skies. It settles beside you like a second pillow — uninvited, heavy, impossible to ignore.
It wraps itself around your ribs and whispers, “I’m still here.” It lingers. “This is who you are now.” It reshapes. And even though the room stayed dark, Mara understood something painfully true: It isn’t the night you fear after being betrayed. It’s waking up and realizing the hurt followed you into tomorrow.
And in that quiet, cruel clarity, Mara realized she wasn’t just heartbroken tonight. She was grieving. Grieving the woman who trusted too deeply, loved too honestly, and believed too wholeheartedly. Because that woman was gone. And someone new — someone sharper, quieter, stronger in a way she had yet to understand — was waiting in the dark, ready to be born from the wreckage.
- Writer
