The day my husband forgot our anniversary, he sent flowers to another woman.
He swore it was just a gesture, a kindness for Livia, his childhood best friend, who was having a rough time. Again. For a decade, it had always been Livia. Her name was the first on his lips with good news, the first he called with bad. I was the quiet audience to their epic.
His mother, Estelle, loved to remind me that I was the interruption. That Livia was the one who understood their family, their history. “Be patient with him, Giselle,” she'd say, her smile a razor blade. “Some bonds are simply unbreakable.” I learned to stop suggesting weekends away. I stopped expecting him home for dinner. I became a ghost in my own apartment, listening for his key in the lock, already knowing his first text of the evening wouldn't be to me.
The turning point wasn't a grand betrayal. My father had died. I stood in our sterile kitchen, the phone shaking in my hand, and when I told Tobiah, he sighed. “Oh, sweetheart. Let me just check on Livia—her flight got delayed and she's a mess at the airport. I'll be right there.” And I knew, with a clarity that finally stilled the ache, that he already was.
How many times can you stand in the rain waiting for a man who refuses to see you're drowning? When does a wife become a bystander in her own life?
There is no cheating in this book.
