His face drained of color.
“Come on.”
“The lease is in my name.”
“Kate, let’s talk.”
“You have forty-eight hours to pack.”
“Don’t do this.”
I laughed once.
A sad, tired sound.
“You stopped talking to me the day I came home from the hospital.”
For once, he had nothing to say.
Within days, the wedding was canceled.
Some of the deposit was refunded.
The invitations were pulled.
Both families learned exactly why the wedding was over.
Adam tried to claim it was all a misunderstanding.
But nobody seemed interested in defending him.
Too many people had watched him perform the role of devoted fiancé.
Too many people now knew how quickly the mask had slipped when he thought no one could see.
By the end of the month, the sympathy he expected never came.
After he moved out, the apartment felt different.
Quieter.
Not lonely.
Peaceful.
For the first few days, I kept listening for the gaming room door to slam.
Then one morning, I realized I had stopped listening.
Mom came over almost every day while I recovered.
Sometimes she brought groceries.
Sometimes she brought gossip.
Sometimes she brought nothing at all and stayed anyway.
One afternoon, while helping me sort through a box of wedding decorations, she held up a bundle of centerpieces and raised an eyebrow.
“What do we do with these?”
I smiled for the first time in what felt like forever.
“A very dramatic bonfire?”
Mom laughed.
“Now that sounds like my daughter.”
We donated most of the decorations and returned what we could.
It was not really about the money.
It was about clearing space.
Little by little, the life I thought I had lost stopped feeling like a tragedy.
It started feeling like an escape.
A few weeks later, my cast finally came off.
Mom drove me to the appointment and sat beside me in the waiting room.
When the technician removed it, I stared at my leg and laughed.
It looked smaller than I remembered.
“Weird, isn’t it?” Mom said.
“A little.”
When we walked out of the clinic, she wrapped an arm around my shoulders.
“You okay?”
I looked up at the sky.
For the first time in months, I realized I was.
