Page 30 of The Humiliated Wife
Fiona’s breath caught in her throat.
It had mattered. To one person. On one day.
That was enough.
She tucked the phone into her pocket and pushed open the classroom door.
The phone buzzedagainst the desk during silent reading time.
Fiona glanced down and saw it: "Dean " lighting up the screen. The red heart a neon sign advertising her own stupidity.
She flipped it face-down without reading the message.
Around her, twenty-three fifth-graders were bent over their books—some actually reading, others staring at pages and daydreaming. The room was filled with the soft rustle of turning pages and the occasional whispered question. Normal sounds. Safe sounds.
The phone buzzed again. And again.
Fiona kept her eyes on her own book. She'd read it already, but she wasn't really absorbing the words anyway. She was just grateful for something to look at that wasn't her phone.
When the period ended and her students shuffled out for lunch, Fiona finally turned the phone over.
Three messages:
Fi, can we talk?
I know you're upset but we need to work this out
You can't just disappear
The audacity of it made her breathless.
He'd shared her private thoughts publicly. And now he was upset that she was choosing her own invisibility?
The phone buzzed in her hands. Another text.
I love you. We can fix this.
Fiona's thumb hovered over the keyboard. Part of her ached to respond. Wanted to type backI love you tooand let him fix everything in her that hurt.
Maybe shewasoverreacting. Maybe this wasn't that bad. Maybe love meant forgiving the unforgivable.
She deleted the messages.
Then she went into his contact and changed his name from "Dean " to just "Dean."
It was a small thing. Petty, maybe. But seeing his name without the heart felt like taking back something that belonged to her.
Her phone buzzed with a call this time. Dean's name—plain, unadorned Dean—filled the screen.
She declined it.
It rang again immediately.
She declined again.
On the third call, she turned the phone completely off.
The silence felt strange. For years, she'd been available to him constantly—texting throughout the day, calling during her lunch break, sending him photos of funny things her students said or interesting clouds she'd spotted on her drive home. She'd thought that closeness was love. That constant connection meant they were building something together.
