Kael hasn't come home tonight either.
His side of the bed this morning is still made. Perfect hospital corners, untouched pillows. Like I'm the only one who lives here, which I guess I have been for weeks now.
I move through our bedroom like I'm underwater. Everything feels slow and thick and wrong. My suitcase comes out of the closet, the cheap one I brought to this marriage.
I start packing what's actually mine.
Scholarship trophy from Princeton. His hoodie—the gray one he gave me sophomore year that still smells like him. Or maybe that's my imagination poisoning me. Photos from before the wedding, back when he looked at me like I mattered.
Everything else stays. The designer dresses Victoria picked out, the jewelry from Tiffany's, the life he built around me like a cage.
I leave it all hanging in the closet like evidence of a crime.
My wedding ring sits heavy on my finger. I twist it off—harder than it should be, like my finger's trying to hold on even though my brain knows better. The wedding album is open on the nightstand, our vows visible in calligraphy.
‘In darkness and light, in wealth and poverty, forever yours.’
I press the heavy gold band right over his smiling mouth in the photo. A perfect circle of silence. A gag. Let him find it there and see what his 'forever' looks like.
The hotel I find is in Queens, the kind with hourly rates advertised in flickering neon. It's all I can stomach right now—something honest about its shittiness. At least this place doesn't pretend to be something it's not.
My phone starts buzzing before I even check in. Once. Twice. Doesn't stop.
I wait until I'm in the room—the walls are a sickly, nicotine-stained beige, with a dark, spidery stain spreading from the ceiling corner. The air is thick with the smell of cheap bleach and stale cigarettes, a chemical-laced attempt to cover up years of desperation.
My phone buzzes against my hip, a frantic, angry vibration that feels like a personal attack. It doesn't stop. I finally pull it out in the room.
The screen is a solid wall of his name. 47 missed calls. The phone feels heavy in my hand, hot, like a small bomb he'd armed and left in my pocket.
The texts scroll like a descent into madness:
"Where are you?"
"Maeve, answer me."
"I need to know where you are."
"Stop scaring me."
I turn the phone off. I can't face his voice. Not right now.
A part of me, a stupid, desperate part, is terrified he'll sound like himself again. Like the Kael I love. And I don't know how I'm supposed to reconcile that with what he did.
At least I have the account. The one Kael set up when we got engaged—his way of making sure I "never had to worry about money." Enough to survive for a while.
Using it feels like accepting payment for services rendered, but I'm too fucking tired to care about pride right now.
Days blur. I don't leave the room except for vending machine runs at 3am when I can't sleep. Don't look for anything. Just cry and replay every moment and try to understand what is wrong with me.
Why wasn't I enough?
The question loops endlessly, a broken record scratching the same groove deeper and deeper. I stare at the water-stained ceiling and see Kael instead.
Those handsome features that belong on magazine covers—sharp jawline, intense blue eyes that once looked at me with nothing but love.
I remember those eyes bloodshot after pulling all-nighters during finals. I remember how they'd track me across rooms like I was the only person there.
My mind spirals backward because forward is unbearable.
My parents died in a car accident when I was fifteen—here one day, gone the next. No warning, no goodbye.
Got into the orphanage at an age where nobody wants to adopt you. Aged out at eighteen with nothing but a full scholarship to Princeton and this bone-deep certainty that I'd always be alone.
Princeton. Where I met Kael in the library during my sophomore year, his junior.
For three years, he was my salvation. The billionaire heir who chose the orphan, who fought his family's disapproval. Who made me believe I could be someone's first choice.
He used to love me like breathing. Couldn't stand being separated even for an hour—would show up at my dorm between his classes just to kiss me against the doorframe.
Cared for me in ways that made my throat tight. Wanted me every night, sometimes multiple times, like he couldn't get enough of me.
I try to find the moment it went wrong, searching for red flags. But everything is confusing in hindsight's cruel light.
How on our wedding night, he'd made love to me like he was memorizing something he'd never have again. Desperate and almost grief-stricken, holding me so tight I couldn't breathe.
How a weeks after the wedding, he started staying late at the office. Two weeks in, sleeping there. Six weeks in, barely looking at me.
I'd tried everything. Cooking his favorite meals that went cold and uneaten—the carbonara he used to devour, sitting untouched on the counter at 2am. Wearing lingerie that went unseen.
Waiting up until 3am only to hear him lock himself in his office instead of coming to our bed.
Was his desperation on our wedding night a warning, or was he terrified of something else? When he started staying late, was he actually avoiding me, or was he trapped?
The hotel TV flickers to life when I hit it hard enough. News alert scrolling across the bottom of some mindless show: Photos of Kael and Gia at a romantic dinner.
Le Bernardin, probably. Somewhere expensive and exclusive and perfect for Manhattan's new power couple.
And Gia's wearing his grandmother's ring.
The ring he promised would be mine forever.
That ring was supposed to be mine. He'd shown it to me at Princeton, held the vintage box like it contained something sacred.
"This was my grandmother's. When I propose, this is going on your finger. Nobody else's."
And he gave it to someone else.
I stay on the bathroom floor because getting up feels impossible. What's wrong with me? The question loops endlessly, each iteration cutting deeper. I can feel tears rolling down my cheeks.
Too plain—face that disappears in photographs.
Too poor—scholarship trash who'll never understand their world.
Too broken from a childhood of being unwanted—damaged goods that looked better from a distance.
Too much of a reminder that he married down.
I touch my own face, fingers tracing features I've spent hours analyzing in this shitty hotel mirror. Wondering what he sees now that makes him recoil. Wondering if he ever really saw me at all, or if I was just some phase he had to work through.
The TV drones on. A photo of them clinking wine glasses, Gia's hand possessive on his arm. He's laughing, his head tilted back.
It’s the smile I haven't seen in months. Not the tight, professional one he gave at the gala, but the real one. The easy, unguarded smile from Princeton.
He looks relieved.
A cold, heavy sickness washes through my stomach, but beneath it, something else stirs. A sharp, painful confusion.
The man on that screen, the one smiling like he's free, doesn't match the man who broke his hand for me. He doesn't match the man who held me in the library stacks and promised I'd never be alone again.
The two images, the Kael I love and this cold stranger on TV, won't fit together in my head.
He wouldn't do this. Not like this.
I stare at the screen, the tears drying on my face, a single, agonizing question taking root in my mind.
I have to understand what's really happening.