“I miss her.”
God, he did.
Not just her body. Not just her laughter.
But her light. Her belief in him. Her stubborn, fragile, unconditional belief in a man who never deserved her. Adair sat in the dark a long time after that.
How did he get here?
From happiness to loneliness?
When the fuck did their marriage go so left that he thought another woman could fix what was broken between them? Where he thought staying away would make him feel like less of a failure?
NEW YORK, FOUR YEARS AGO
The apartment was quiet except for the faint whirr of the box fan in the living room window and the distant echo of Sabine’s voice. Adair had just walked in from a late night at the library. Case notes tucked under his arm, tie loose, collar unbuttoned. He didn’t call ahead, just needed to see his family. He missed her. Missed Ade. The weight of everything had been getting heavier by the day, but coming home to them was supposed to be the relief.
He paused in the hallway, hearing her voice carry softly from their bedroom. She was on the phone—FaceTime, maybe. Laughing lightly at first but then her tone shifted. His name hadn’t come up, yet something in him stopped cold anyway.
“I hate it here,” she said. The words didn’t come with venom. They came like confession. Worn and exhausted. Adairfroze just outside the doorway, back against the wall. “I hate it in New York. I feel like I’m… shrinking,” she said. “Like I’m disappearing a little more every day.”
Adair knew that voice. The one she used when she was trying not to cry. The one she used when she didn't want to be overheard. It cracked right in the center, right at the edge of breaking.
Narri was on the other end. He could recognize her cadence even from the faint speaker distortion. “Bitch, come home then. Ain’t nobody making you stay in that shoebox with them pigeons and trains and overpriced ass groceries.”
Sabine chuckled, but it was thin. “I can’t just leave, Nar,” she said. “This is Adair’s shot. His dream. His whole life is here right now.”
“Okay, but what about your life?”
Silence.
And then Sabine whispered something that gutted him.
“I regret not putting up more of a fight. I just…blindly followed a man I barely knew.”
Adair’s chest tightened. The words hit like a blow.
Parthenia's voice joined in gently. “Bine...I know when I asked back when y’all first got married if it felt too fast, you got a little offended…but if I asked you that again…how would you answer now?”
There was a long pause.
Sabine’s voice dropped even lower. “I don’t regret my husband. Or my son. I love them with everything in me. But…I do wish I could’ve waited just a little longer. Just to find me more. I’m only twenty-two. Now I’m pregnant again,” she said with a bit of disdain. “I feel like I’m being erased. I hate this.”
Adair’s knees nearly buckled. He’d been so focused on providing, on proving himself, on being everything for her, that he hadn’t stopped to ask what she needed for herself. Hethought taking her with him was love. He thought building a life together—school, baby, marriage—meant she was with him in all of it.
But maybe she hadn’t been.Maybe she had followed him because there wasn’t room for her own direction.Maybe he had mistaken proximity for partnership.
He leaned back against the wall, stared up at the ceiling, blinking fast. His vision blurred and it wasn’t from exhaustion this time. In that moment, Adair felt like nothing. Like he’d dragged her into this life, mistaking obligation for love. Like he’d caged the carefree, radiant woman he fell in love with and called it a home. He thought about the first version of Sabine—the one who made corny ass jokes, danced badly in the kitchen barefoot, sent him poems at 2am just because she felt something and had to say it. She was alive. Unapologetic. Sure of herself.
Now? She cried behind closed doors and whispered her needs into phones instead of to him and that wasn’t her fault.
It was his.
That night, he didn’t walk into the bedroom. He didn’t tell her he overheard. Didn’t hold her or ask what she needed or say I’m sorry. He just stood in the hallway, alone in the dark, realizing he might’ve broken something without ever lifting a hand.
That was the moment their marriage changed.Not with a slam or a scream but with a whisper she didn’t know he heard.
And that whisper?