Married to my ex

CHAPTER THREE:THE YELLOW DRESS

Chapter Three: Yellow Dress

Five years earlier

Beatrice had chosen the yellow dress because Roman had once told her, half-asleep and entirely unguarded, that yellow suited her better than any colour had a right to.

She'd kept that sentence for eight months like a coin in a pocket, turning it over whenever the day felt heavier than it should, and today — graduation day, the last day either of them would technically belong to this school, this town, this particular version of themselves — she'd decided it deserved spending.

She stood outside the main hall in the thin morning sun, gown draped over one arm because it was too hot to wear it yet, and watched the car park fill slowly with parents taking photographs of children who'd stopped being children roughly a decade too late for anyone to admit it. Her aunt was already inside, saving two seats, dabbing at her eyes the way she'd done at every milestone since Beatrice's mother died, half joy and half something rawer that Beatrice had learned not to ask about.

Beatrice checked her phone. No message yet from Roman, but that wasn't strange — he was always either shockingly punctual or catastrophically not, with nothing reliable in between, and today of all days she assumed he'd be running behind. His father had insisted on some breakfast thing that morning, some Hoxwood ritual involving a photographer and a car too expensive for a school car park, and Roman had texted her the night before, sorry in advance if I'm late, you know how he gets, with a string of complaints about his father's insistence on documenting every milestone as though it were a shareholder update.

She hadn't minded. She'd been too busy, that night, imagining the two of them at university together in September — different cities, technically, but close enough for weekend trains, close enough that the eighteen months of secretly dating a boy whose family made hers look, by comparison, entirely invisible, might finally stop needing to be secret at all. She'd pictured telling her aunt properly. She'd pictured, in her more reckless moments, telling his father to his face and watching the man's careful composure crack for once.

She saw the car before she saw him — black, low, the kind of car that made the other parents' cars look apologetic by comparison — and felt the particular lift in her chest that she'd stopped trying to talk herself out of months ago. She waved. He didn't wave back, which she noted and then, deliberately, chose not to read into, because it was graduation day and she had decided, this morning, in front of the mirror in the yellow dress, that today was going to be a good day regardless of what shape his mood arrived in.

He got out of the car alone. That was strange enough to actually register — his father usually orbited these things closely, hovering with the photographer, making sure the right people saw the right version of events — but Charles Hoxwood was nowhere in sight, and Roman was walking towards her with his hands in his pockets and his eyes fixed somewhere just past her shoulder, in a way that made the lift in her chest falter before she'd even worked out why.

"Hey," she said, when he was close enough. "You look like you haven't slept."

"I haven't, really." His voice was flat in a way she didn't recognise. He wasn't smiling. Roman, whatever else he was, always smiled at her first — it was one of the small, private facts about him she'd collected over eighteen months, the way his face did something involuntary and warm the second he saw her, before he remembered to be composed about anything. It wasn't happening now.

"Okay," she said slowly. "Is everything alright? Is it your dad—"

"Can we walk?" He nodded towards the far end of the car park, away from the crowd, away from her aunt's window seat and the photographer setting up by the hall doors. Beatrice felt something cold settle low in her stomach, the particular dread of a person who has spent a lifetime learning to read rooms and bodies and is very good, unfortunately, at reading this one.

She walked with him anyway, because the alternative was standing still and finding out right there in front of everyone, and some instinct in her, even then, was already trying to protect the last few seconds of not knowing.

"Roman. You're scaring me."

He stopped by the low wall at the edge of the car park, out of earshot of everyone, and finally looked at her properly — and she saw, in the half-second before he arranged his face into something steadier, that whatever he was about to say was costing him something. She held onto that half-second for years afterwards, turning it over the way she'd once turned over the sentence about the yellow dress, trying to decide whether it made what came next better or infinitely worse.

"I can't do this anymore," he said. "Us. I think we should stop."

The morning did something strange around her — the sun stayed exactly as bright, the photographer's assistant laughed at something near the hall doors, a car alarm chirped twice in the distance — while everything inside Beatrice went very quiet and very still, the way a room goes quiet after something breaks.

"Stop," she repeated, because her mind seemed to need the word said back before it would process it. "You mean — break up. Today."

"Yes."

"Why?" It came out smaller than she wanted it to. She hated that, even then, hated that her voice couldn't manage the composure she was reaching for. "Roman, we talked about September. We talked about — you told me, two weeks ago, that you'd figure out the trains, that it didn't matter that we'd be in different—"

"I know what I said." He wasn't looking at her shoulder anymore. He was looking directly at her, and there was something in his face that looked almost like begging, though she couldn't yet imagine what he'd be begging her for. "It doesn't matter. I need you to just — accept that this isn't going to work, Beatrice. That's all I can give you right now."

"That's not a reason. That's not an actual reason, that's just—" She stopped, because her voice had started to shake in a way she refused to let him see finish shaking. "Is it someone else?"

Something crossed his face too fast to name — guilt, maybe, or fear, or both at once — and he looked away from her, out towards the road, and she watched him choose, very deliberately, not to answer the question at all.

"I have to go," he said instead. "I'm sorry. I really am."

He turned and walked back towards the car before she could say anything else, before she could ask the six other questions crowding behind the first one, before she'd even fully absorbed that this — this flat grey conversation by a low brick wall, on the one morning she'd spent months imagining as something else entirely — was actually happening to her and not to some other, less careful version of herself who'd let her guard down enough to deserve it.

She stood very still in the yellow dress, in the thin morning sun, and watched the black car pull away, and did not, for a long time afterwards, understand that the boy driving it had just done the one thing his father asked of him without a single word of protest — and that neither of them, in that moment, had the faintest idea it wouldn't be the last time.