Page 23 of October
"He wasn't always like that, you know. I met James when I was twenty-three," she began softly, her voice roughened at the edges. "I'd just started my first job—marketing, downtown. He walked into that office like he owned the air, like the world bent to him without effort."
She smiled, but it was an old, cracked smile, one that didn't reach her eyes.
"He made me feel seen. Not just noticed, seen. Like everything about me was fascinating. I used to think he could read my mind."
Her voice wavered with the memory.
"In the beginning, he was all grand gestures and stolen kisses. He used to leave me poems—terrible ones, too many metaphors—but I'd keep them in drawers. He'd bring me soup when I was sick, pick flowers from the roadside on our drives. He once carved our initials into the bark of a cypress tree and told me it meant we were 'written into the bones of the world.'"
She paused, eyes glistening. Her hands unclenched just a little.
"I thought I had found a love worth fighting for. I vowed to be his partner in all things. To walk beside him in ambition, in failure, in triumph. And I did. God, I did."
Jeanine drew a breath, deeper now, heavier.
"But love like that... it can make you blind. You don't see the rot creeping in. Not until the walls start to crack."
Her gaze grew distant.
"The first time he raised his voice at me, I told myself he was tired. That his job was hard, that I should be more understanding. The first time I found lipstick that wasn't mine, I convinced myself it was innocent. A colleague. A mistake. We had a fight—he cried. I believed him."
Her voice hardened slightly, as if she were pressing against something sharp.
"And then came the second affair. And the third. They stopped being accidents and became patterns. But by then I was already too deep. Too wrapped up in the image of us. The power couple. The perfect house. The dinner parties with crystal glasses and charcuterie boards. I was performing happiness, convincing everyone—including myself—that it was still real."
She looked directly at me now. Her voice low, clear, heavy with the truth.
"I thought staying was noble," she said, her voice soft, almost a whisper, but steady in its pain.
"I told myself that loyalty meant weathering storms. That real love—the kind you vow to protect through sickness and health, richer or poorer, better or worse—meant endurance. Patience. Sacrifice. That if I just held on long enough, if I just smiled enough, forgave enough, made the house warm enough, the man I married would come back."
She paused, looking not at me but beyond me, as if the truth she was about to speak lived somewhere far off—across the years, hidden in the folds of a faded wedding dress or the corners of a love letter yellowed with time.
"I used to wait by the window in the early days, you know? Whenever he worked late. I'd make his favorite tea, light a candle, put on the perfume he liked. Because I believed that love was a kind of lighthouse. That if I stayed lit—steady, visible—he'd find his way back to me."
She drew in a shaky breath, her eyes flickering toward mine.
"I gave him the best years of my life thinking I was being virtuous. But I was just slowly disappearing. Bit by bit. Smile by smile."
Her voice faltered, just for a second—just long enough for me to hear the depth of what she meant. Not just disappearing from the relationship, but from herself.
"I thought I was being strong," she continued, almost as if trying to convince herself. "I thought compromise was love, that shrinking myself to make room for him was what a good wife did. Every time he ignored me, I told myself to be patient. Every time he looked through me like I was wallpaper, I reminded myself that love was quiet, not loud. That it was sacrifice. Endurance. That it meant putting him first."
Her hands trembled, but her voice grew steadier.
"I smiled through anniversaries he forgot. I swallowed tears in rooms where I didn't feel welcome. I learned to say 'it's fine' when it wasn't. To smooth out my dress and my voice and my expectations. I used to think if I just held on—tight enough, long enough—he would come back to me. That the man I married, the man who once looked at me like I held the sun in my hands, would return."
A single tear slid down her cheek, but she didn't wipe it away.
"But he didn't come back," she whispered. "And somewhere in all that waiting, I lost myself. I wasn't being loyal. I was being erased."
She turned her head then, slowly, deliberately, her eyes meeting mine with a clarity that was both heartbreaking and electric.
"A woman knows when she's vanishing," she said, her voice low and sharp like broken glass. "We feel it. In the silence after dinner. In the empty side of the bed. In the way our names stop being said aloud. I stayed because I thought that's what love demanded. But all it did was train me to survive on crumbs."
A silence settled between us—thick, breathless, aching.
"But here's what they never tell you about leaving," she said, fiercer now, like a woman standing at the edge of a cliff and finally choosing to jump.
