Page 8 of Letting Go

I don’t believe him. I don’t not believe him. I just... file it away. Like evidence. Like a loose thread I’m going to pull later when I’ve had more caffeine and less reason to cry.

And then, then he does the thing.

He unhooks the security chain on the front door. The one I latched last night.

He pauses.

Just a heartbeat.

And I swear to God, in that tiny moment, the lie crystallizes between us like ice.

Then he does what he always does. Moves past it. Pretends. Plays along. He opens the door, steps out like nothing just snapped in the space between us.

I sit there, mug warm in my hands, and stare at the door he closed behind him.

Because now I know.

And he knows I know.

I suppose the real question is, when did I start to suspect? And if I suspected, why the hell did I stay quiet?

The answer isn’t clean. Nothing about this is. It’s like trying to pinpoint the moment water starts to boil, youcan stare and stare and still miss when the bubbles begin.

Everything just came at once. Leonard, the walking HR violation in a suit, taking over the office like a plague. The long hours, the gaslighting, the meetings that felt more like performance reviews for my uterus than my actual work. I was working myself sick.

I was isolated, Mike wasn’t interest in hearing me vent and Hannah was having her own problems, in the form of her helicopter mother-in-law. We didn’t even talk much anymore because neither of us had the bandwidth to carry both our frustrations at the same time. We’d just exchange these hollow texts and pretend we weren’t both drowning.

And then… the slow, awful realization.

It started when I came home from a business trip, nearly six months ago. Nothing major. Just three days in Seattle, a shit hotel, and a bunch of overcooked client dinners. Usually, when I got home, I would barely make it through the front door before Mike and I were all over each other. Like magnets. Like a cliché I didn’t know I cherished until it vanished.

But this time… when I reached for him, he pulled away. Said he was coming down with something.

His first lie.

I told myself he was still pissed about me cancelling our trip. We’d fought. I’d been blunt. Maybe too blunt.I thought he was stewing, licking his ego wounds, needing space.

Then one day, a message came in. I picked up my phone on instinct, Chris, who always had a sixth sense for drama, had glanced over and raised an eyebrow. “Hubby keeping tabs on you?”

But it wasn’t Mike.

It was Keira. Again. Some random question or excuse to message me. She’d been weirdly chatty ever since she moved back in with our parents. Overfriendly. Popping up with memes and passive-aggressive little jokes I didn’t have the patience for.

And Chris, God, he said it so casually. “Trouble in paradise?”

I opened my mouth to say no, but the words didn’t come. Because in that moment I realized,

Mike hadn’t texted me. Not really. Not in weeks.

He replied, sure. Brief, polite, efficient. But when I scrolled back, really scrolled, I saw it. The absence. He hadn’t reached out in a long time. No “thinking about you” texts. No dumb photos. No inside jokes or ‘what’s for dinner?’ flirts. Not for a while.

The last text he had sent me was Christmas day, a direct, “Are you really doing this?” He didn’t get that I had to go, that if I hadn’t, Leanord would have cause to fire me and all the effort and time I put into this job would be for nothing. Like it is now.

We haven’t had sex since Christmas.

There. I said it.

And I don’t mean “the spark has fizzled” or “we’ve both been so busy,” I mean nothing. Not a touch. Not a brush of a thigh in bed. Not even one of those half-hearted, let’s-get-this-over-with pity sessions. Just a whole lot of cold sheets and me curled around the emptiness like it’s supposed to keep me warm.

---