Page 40 of The Vow Thief
I set the phone face down on the coffee table.
I don’t want anyone else’s voice in my head tonight. Not the ones who begged me to forgive him, not the ones who wanted me to burn it all down the second he confessed. Not even the ones who mean well.
Because none of them were there in the quiet moments after the storm, when I was still waking up married to someone I didn’t trust.
None of them heard my heartbeat speed up every time he picked up his phone and turned away.
None of them know what it’s like to smile at your children while part of you feels like it’s dying inside.
They love me. I know that. But they love me in theory.
They love the version of me who makes strong choices and rises from the ashes.
They don’t know how hard it is to keep breathing when your whole life has been rewritten and you’re the one who held the pen.
I leaned into the couch cushion, that stupid, hollowed-out spot.
Ten years of him living in this house, and somehow it only took one day for it to feel like he didn’t belong here anymore.
But the furniture doesn’t know that. The air doesn’t know that.
And maybe a small part of me doesn’t either. Not yet.
There’s still a faint dent on the carpet where his boxes sat for the last two days. It’s ridiculous, but I keep looking at it, like maybe it will evaporate and take all of this with it. That mark feels louder than the silence. Proof that he was here, and now he isn’t.
I don’t feel strong or free or anything close to brave. Right now, I just feel tired in my bones. Like the kind of tired you can’t sleep off. Maybe it’s grief. Maybe it’s relief. Maybe it’s both, tangled so tightly I can’t pull them apart yet.
I keep wondering if I should cry more. Like maybe there’s a quota I’m supposed to hit to officially mourn something like this. But my tears feel rationed. I cried so much in the early days, when everything shattered, that now all that’s left is this weird stillness. It’s not peace. It’s just... still.
I keep thinking about the version of me who would’ve done anything to fix things. She stayed long past the point of hope. She showed up to therapy, to dinner, to conversations that felt like chewing glass. She believed that if you love someone hard enough, you can fix them. But I don’t believe that anymore.
I caught a glimpse of myself in the dark window, just a reflection, just a tired woman in an old hoodie, hair knotted, eyes swollen, and I felt something sharp and unfamiliar. Not sadness. The raw recognition that this is mine now.
The house.
The silence.
The decisions.
The nights like this, where grief and peace sit side by side and neither one wins.
I could still smell him, faintly. The last of his cologne clinging to the fibers of this place.
The truth is, he’s gone, but the hardest part isn’t. The hardest part is standing in the wreckage and choosing not to rebuild with the same broken pieces. It’s looking around this house and still seeing ghosts of the life we planned, weekend pancakes, Christmas mornings, arguments in the kitchen. And knowing I have to make space for something else now.
I don’t know who I am without the role I played in that marriage. But I do know who I was becoming inside it, and I didn’t like her. She was shrinking. She was bitter. She was waiting for love to feel safe again instead of fighting for it herself.
So maybe this is what the first night of freedom feels like. Just a woman sitting in a dim living room, staring at a dent in the carpet, knowing she made the right decision.
I sat there, in the soft imprint he left behind, and I let it hurt.
I didn’t try to push it away or fill it with noise or wine or someone else’s body.
I just let it ache.
Chapter 20 - The Guilded Cage
Lily’s POV
