Page 77 of The Weight of Her Silence
And mine ran out.
But yours hasn’t.
The last line unraveled him. He held the letter against his chest like it was a lifeline, like maybe if he held it long enough, her voice would echo again in the room.
"I'm so sorry, Lila," he whispered.
It was too late.
But maybe… maybe the part of her that had loved him once could still live on in the way he showed up for their children. In the way he learned to live with what he’d lost and refused to let the rest of it rot.
For the first time in weeks, Nate looked out the window, where the sky was streaked with soft gold.
It looked like her.
Chapter 46
For the Other Woman
It was late afternoon when Nate opened the second envelope. He found it tucked inside one of Lila’s old sketchbooks, pressed between a half-finished drawing of the kids and a grocery list she’d never thrown out. Her handwriting was unmistakable—elegant, steady, unhurried.
To Camille.
No postage. No salutation. Just a name.
He stared at it for a long time. And then he opened it.
Camille,
You’ve stolen a lot from me.
Let’s not pretend otherwise.
You took my husband. My peace. My sleep. You took years I’ll never get back, moments that should’ve belonged to me. To my children. To the life I built with shaking hands.
But the worst part? You didn’t take him because you loved him. You took him because you wanted to win.
You wanted to be chosen. And for a while, you were. At least physically. In secret.
But Nate was never fully yours, was he? Not even when he swore he would be. Because no matter how far he wandered, part of him still came home to me.
I used to hate you. I won’t lie.
I hated the way you laughed at things I used to say. I hated the perfume you left behind on his shirts. I hated how little you seemed to care that you were destroying someone else’s world.
But now…
Now I just feel sorry for you.
Because you spent over a decade trying to be enough for a man who used you to fill a hollow space inside himself. And I spent over a decade trying to be enough for the same man in a different way.
We both lost.
You never really had him.
And I… I lost him long before you touched him.
Nate stopped reading for a moment. His heart pounded, his vision blurred. But he kept going.
