Page 28 of The Weight of Her Silence
Not when he was already giving pieces of himself to someone else.
Camille
She watched the children’s photos on his phone with quiet disdain.
“I’m not trying to replace her,” she murmured one night, fingers tracing the outline of Nate’s collarbone.
“But don’t you think you deserve happiness too?”
Nate didn’t answer.
So Camille pressed on.
“She doesn’t touch you. Doesn’t see you. You’re a man wasting away in that house. And for what?”
She wasn’t asking.
She was staking a claim.
And Nate knew, deep down, that this was no longer a game.
Camille didn’t just want sex.
She wanted a life.
One he had promised to someone else.
Chapter 24
What the Mirror Doesn’t Hide
The clinic smelled like antiseptic and resignation. Lila sat under the fluorescent lights, a clipboard in her lap, ignoring the hollow ache in her back and the metallic taste that lingered on her tongue since her first round of chemotherapy.
She hadn’t told Nate. Not because she was afraid of his reaction—no, that part of her had long since been hollowed out. It was because she already knew what he would do.
He would come, maybe. He would bring her soup, or warm blankets, or feign concern. But his eyes would stay distant, like they always did now.
He would show up in body, not in soul. And the grief of that—his absence while sitting beside her—was heavier than the diagnosis itself.
So she told no one except her sister, who cried silently on the phone when Lila whispered the words she hadn’t spoken out loud until that night.
“I have cancer.”
Three syllables. That was all it took to change the way she saw everything. And yet, the children couldn’t know.
Not yet. So she smiled when she made their lunches. She nodded when Ava asked to sleep over at a friend’s house, and kissed Caleb’s forehead after his nightmares.
But every night, after they were tucked in, she vomited in the downstairs bathroom with the door locked. She was disappearing. Inch by inch and Nate hadn’t even noticed.
Nate
It was the third time that week he caught Lila sitting at the kitchen table, unmoving. Her cup of tea sat untouched.
She wore a sweater despite the warmth in the house, sleeves pulled down to cover her hands. She looked… smaller somehow. Faded.
“Are you okay?” he asked, for the first time in weeks.
She looked up, startled, then nodded.
