Nicholas
The silence in the room stretched so long I could hear the rain lashing against the glass and the frantic, uneven rhythm of my own breath.
I had never said those words out loud to another living human being. Not to my lawyers, not to my mother, and certainly not to the grief counselors Arthur had hired after the funeral. I had buried that dark, rotting secret deep inside my chest, letting it consume me from the inside out for two long years.
"When I looked down at my phone at three in the morning," I continued, my raspy voice barely more than a whisper in the shadow-drenched room, "there were four missed calls. And a voicemail from the paramedics."
I stared into the dying embers of the hearth, my jaw tight, my chest burning with a suffocating, familiar agony.
"Our marriage ha
