I held the phone tight, my mother-in-law’s laughter still ringing in my ears. And my husband, Cyrus, looked me dead in the eye and asked me to be the one to apologize.
It started with a toast, I think. Or maybe it was the way Anouk Ortega always found the one tender spot and pressed. That night, it was my career. A “suggestion” that a real artist wouldn’t need a day job, delivered with a smile that cut like glass. I waited for Cyrus to say something. To defend me. To defend us. He just stirred his drink.
It became our pattern. A criticism about how I kept our apartment. A “joke” about my family. Every time, I was the one left bruised. Every time, Cyrus would take me aside later. *You know how she is. Just smooth it over. For me.* He began spending more nights at their place, helping his father with some endless project. I’d lie awake in our city apartment, listening to the distant sirens, feeling the space between us widen into a canyon.
The final dinner was just another Tuesday. Anouk brought her niece, a sweet, impressionable girl named Jessamy who hung on Cyrus’s every word. Anouk called me ambitious. Harlan, his father, chuckled and said Cyrus needed a wife who understood family came first. They talked about children. The kind of mother I would be. The kind of mother Jessamy would be. Cyrus nodded along.
Then the question came. About a loan. For them. A significant one. From our savings. The savings for the studio space I’d been planning for years. Cyrus didn’t even look at me. He just said, “We’ll talk about it.”
In the car, the silence was a physical weight. I said it felt like they were trying to erase me. Replace me with a version of a wife they approved of. He slammed his hands on the steering wheel. “Why do you always have to make everything so difficult? They’re my family.”
And I finally understood. I wasn’t his family. I was the problem he had to manage.
Is there a line where love becomes compromise, and compromise becomes self-betrayal? Can a man who chooses his parents over his wife ever really be a husband?
There is no cheating in this book.
