MARCUS
I didn’t know how to erase her.
Her clothes mingled with mine in the laundry basket. Her heels sat in wait under the window on her side of the bed. Her toothbrush leaned opposite mine. The scent of gardenias hung in the air of my bathroom.
Her ring sat on my dresser, watching me.
I could pack her things, put them away. But she wouldn’t be gone. Not from my home. Not from my thoughts. And never from my heart. Her name was etched in the muscle, and though it might someday heal, there would always be a scar to shape the letters once shaped by my lips.
Yesterday had been gruesome, a timeless stretch of suffering. Telling my family what happened had been unbearable. Home had been painfully, tangibly empty.
And the night had been unending.
I gave up the fight for sleep sometime around five in the morning, my eyes stinging and bleary. I made coffee because that was what I was supposed to do. I took the cup to my room, sat in the chair in the dark. Stared at those heels where they stood, innocuous and empty, as the sun rose. And when my coffee cooled, full and forgotten, I stood and dressed for the day.
All the while, my thoughts blurred together, indistinct and without purpose. There was nothing to decide. No action to take. There was nothing to piece together, no question to answer. Only the echoes of what had been said and the companionship of my heartbreak.
I’d tried to distinguish what hurt the worst. Her shocking fury. Her certainty—absolute and irrefutable. Her instinct not to trust me even though I’d given her no reason to doubt. Her unwillingness to listen to me.
She blamed and condemned without question, unshakable in her rightness.
That. That was the most painful of all.
She hadn’t even given me a chance.
And I wasn’t willing to fight her faithlessness to change her mind.
If this was what she thought of me, our troubles ran deeper than this fight. I’d known the second I saw her hysteria. I knew what she’d seen, what she’d lost, the magnitude of which had torn her in two. I even knew she didn’t mean what she’d said, not really. When she calmed down, she’d realize she was wrong.
But the damage had been done. The rosy haze we’d floated through since we met cleared in the span of just a few moments, moments that could never be taken back or redrawn. Words that couldn’t be reeled in or erased. And in those moments, I saw another woman, one I didn’t recognize. One who reminded me very much of her mother, a bond I hadn’t believed existed until right then.
Maybe her mother had done this to her, conditioned her. Perhaps that likeness had been there all along, and I was too blinded by my feelings for her and her rejection of her mother to acknowledge it. But in the end, she’d turned on me at the very first opportunity and in such a savage way that I instantly doubted every emotion I’d felt, questioned every minute with her.
Our trust had been shattered, and there wasn’t enough glue in the world to put it back together.
If she mistrusted me so immediately, so deeply, then I didn’t know what we were doing together. I didn’t know how to go on, and I didn’t know what she could say.
I did know that I missed her. I knew that I loved her even though I no longer trusted her. I wished wishes came true so I could take us back in time, so I could recapture that magic when we were still pure and untainted.
But we couldn’t go back, and the path before us was a soupy wall of fog so thick, it had become an impasse. The only thing that could break it up was sunshine, and I had a feeling we wouldn’t see that for a long, long time.
I walked to the window, stood for a long moment with my eyes on those empty shoes. And then I picked them up and placed them in the bottom of my closet, right next to her suitcase.
As I closed the door, I knew this was the only way to erase her. One little thing at a time until she was gone.
I shoved my mind in the direction of my day, listing the things I would do to occupy myself. My only hope was to exhaust myself enough to fall into bed when I finally came home. Though somehow I knew that no amount of exhaustion would stop me from spending the sleepless night thinking about her.
When the doorbell rang, I stopped, my heart staggering, her name on my lips.
As I walked to the door and pulled it open, I knew without question I would find her standing there.
She was too small, too colorless. Pale hair and skin, dark eyes smudged with shadows from a sleepless night of her own.
A flare of pink rose in her cheeks when our eyes met.
The instinct to reach for her sent a blazing streak of pain through my chest.
Neither of us spoke.
“I …” she started, instantly fumbling. “May I come in?”
I moved out of the way, watching her as she passed.
We didn’t make a move beyond the entryway. I didn’t invite her in further.
She watched me with those starless, sad eyes. “Would you believe me if I said I was sorry?”
“Yes. But I don’t know what it would change.”
Her throat worked. “It doesn’t seem like enough, those words. They can’t explain the depth of what it means to be sorry, too common and shallow for how I regret what I said yesterday, what I did. I could tell you all the reasons, but I think you know them already. Mostly, I wasn’t myself.”
“No, you weren’t. Or maybe you were. I’m not sure I know anymore.”
“Please, don’t say that. On some fundamental level, you and I know one another. You said so yourself.”
“I remember,” I said softly.
“I don’t know what possessed me yesterday. It was all so much, and I just … it made sense. In my mind, in that moment, it made sense—your pushing me to come clean, the math of it all, even the possibility of you getting her out of the way. But I was wrong. I know you’d never have betrayed my trust. Instead, I betrayed yours.”
“It wasn’t just a betrayal of trust. You defaulted to accusations. You defaulted to blaming me. Without thought, without reason, you put my head on the block and swung the ax.”
“I know,” she said to her shoes.
We were silent for a beat.
“Why did you come here today?”
Her gaze lifted to meet mine. “Because I love you. Because I was wrong, and I want to make it right. How can I earn your trust again? How can I beg your forgiveness? How can I say that I’m sorry when words aren’t enough?” A shake of her head, a glance at the floor. “Of all the things I’ve walked away from, of all the things I’ve lost, you’re the one I will never forgive myself for. So I had to try.”
The fissure in my heart cracked wider, drove deeper.
“Is there anything I can say?” she asked. “Is there anything I can do? Tell me, and I’ll do it. Just don’t say it’s over. Please, don’t say that.” Her voice broke, her eyes shining with tears.
Emotion gripped my throat, my heart whispering acceptance and my mind screaming defense. But when her tears spilled over, my heart won.
Slowly, I pulled her into my arms, held her to my chest, warred with myself. Because this felt right—she felt right. But what she’d done was wrong, and my mind held fast to that violation, wielding it like a mace.
“You asked me what you could do,” I said.