I set my bag down and crossed to the kitchen. There on the counter sat a plastic clamshell from Flay’s, the logo soft and blurred where condensation had soaked into it. He’d thought to get me dinner, remembered what I liked, and set it out for me.
Exhaustion became the only thing left in me.
I stood there for a moment with my hand on the lid, not opening it yet.
The hardest part wasn’t the fights or the coldness—those I could name, categorize, and defend myself against. It was the unthinking generosities that left me bleeding: a plate of pasta waiting when I worked late, fingers intertwining with mine in the blue glow of the television. Little proofs that I wasn’t leaving a monster, but someone whose feelings no longer filled the space it once did, someone I’d outgrown like a sweater still soft but too small.
My fingers lifted the lid.
Lettuce. Cucumber. Tomato. A sad little plastic cup of ranch dressing.
I stared at it, waiting. Perhaps there was more, a burger wrapped in foil. A paper bag of fries tucked behind the microwave, anything with actual substance.
Nothing.
Only foliage.
“I already ate,” he called from the couch, as if that explained everything.
I turned, still holding the container open in my hands. “It’sa salad.”
“Yeah.”
“Why would you get me a salad and not a burger?”
He muted the TV.
The remote’s click echoed in our living room, and my stomach knotted with dread. Four years together had taught me Peter’s patterns—the television became silent only when he needed my full attention, when words of consequence were coming. Those moments, as rare as snow in summer, and as disorienting.
He shifted on the couch and turned to face me fully.
And I saw it.
Right there. Not tucked away behind politeness or careful wording. Not hidden at all.
Disgust.
Plain in the open and unapologetic, sitting on his face as if it had been there for months and he’d simply stopped caring enough to cover it.
“Sloane,” he said, and even the way he said my name sounded exhausted, like I’d already disappointed him and we hadn’t even started. “When we met, you were a hundred and ten pounds.” He paused. “I loved that about you.”
The words sank in, and my body froze in place. I wasn’t clenching my fists or gritting my teeth. I wasn’t even experiencing the heat of anger. I became simply suspended, like those split seconds after you hear glass breaking but before you see what’s been destroyed.
“I loved fucking you then,” he said.
My stomach dropped straight through the floor.
He stopped talking, but he didn’t stop looking. His eyes moved over me—slowly, deliberately—traveling down andback up again with an expression that made me want to cross my arms, shrink, disappear. That was not how a person views someone they cherish, or even the way someone looks at a stranger.
It served as an evaluation. Cold and final.
Like he’d already made up his mind about what he saw, and none of it was worth his time.
“Well now…” He hesitated, as if trying to find a version of the truth that didn’t make him sound like an asshole.
He didn’t find one.
“…now it’s like I’m fucking someone who’s let themselves go.”