Chapter 4
609 Words
But Tristan's expression was cold. "What I'm seeing is the truth," he said, gesturing at the chat log on the phone.
A laugh tore out of me, until tears came with it.
Six years. I had thought I was waiting for Tristan to propose. Instead, what I'd been waiting for was for him to slander me.
"Fine. In that case, I quit." I held out the resignation letter I'd already prepared.
He didn't take it. His face darkened. "I hope you're not playing games with your career. This is a personal matter. All you have to do is apologize to Sera."
Seraphina put on her most reasonable expression. "That's right, Marina. Just say sorry, and promise you won't do it again. I'll forgive you, and we can keep being friends. After all, I'm carrying Tris's baby. I won't hold a small thing like this against you."
Something in my head went blank.
So they were already that far along.
I jerked my hand away from Seraphina's, and she let herself fall with the motion. Tristan caught her in an instant. He glared at me. "Sera was being kind, and you actually shoved her!"
I started to explain, but he wasn't listening. He was watching the tears slip down Seraphina's face, and the tenderness in his eyes was almost spilling over. The same look he'd once worn when he learned how bleak my childhood had been.
And just like that, it became clear.
Tristan hadn't agreed to marry Seraphina because his mother was gravely ill. He had fallen for her, ride after ride, in that car of hers. Because no one could ever force Tristan into anything he didn't want. Like the time my grandmother was dying, when the old woman wanted to meet my boyfriend so she could go in peace. I'd begged him through tears to come to the hospital. But he'd said, "We're in a secret romance. No one can know. Not even your grandmother."
So if he didn't want to, nothing in the world could move him.
Now, watching Seraphina clutch her stomach and cry out in pain, he shoved me, hard. The man who had always been so restrained had lost himself in front of everyone.
The last time he'd looked like that was the day I'd gone out without any of my disguises. A stranger pointed at my face and shouted, "You go out looking like that to scare people, you freak!" Tristan had knocked him to the ground with a single punch.
Now he was using that same anger on me, for Seraphina's sake.
When I hit the floor, the back of my head struck the corner of a desk. The resignation letter slipped down by my feet.
If Tristan hadn't worked at this company, I would have moved on long ago. Every year, offers from companies I admired had come through, and every time I stayed because of one sentence from him: "I need you." I'd stayed at his side, his right hand, his left hand, whatever he needed. But I was done quietly standing in his shadow now. In my career. In love. In all of it.
I rose slowly. Blood ran from the back of my head, making my skin look even more ghostly white. The looks people gave me sharpened into something closer to the way you'd look at a monster, and several of them stepped back.
The instant Tristan saw the blood, panic flashed across his face, as if he hadn't realized he'd struck me that hard.
I pressed the resignation letter into his hand.
"I'm leaving. I won't be in tomorrow. And our six years end here."
- Writer
