THE KITCHEN gleamed under the morning light, every surface polished to mirror brightness, every dish aligned with surgical precision. Cillian's hands moved in relentless circles across the marble countertop, the dishrag already dry from overuse, rough against his palms like penance. He pressed harder, muscles burning in his forearms as if he could scrub away more than coffee stains and crumbs – as if he could polish out the memory of Auden's face when she'd looked at him like he was already a stranger.

Focus on the task. Focus on making it perfect.

The counter didn't need this attention. It was already spotless. Had been for the last twenty-minutes. But his hands kept moving anyway, tracing the same tight circles until the marble gleamed like liquid mercury. Each pass of the cloth was a mantra against thinking, against remembering the way her voice had gone flat when she'd said his name, that careful distance creeping in where warmth used to live.

He moved to the stovetop next, attacking imaginary grease stains with the dedication of a monk at prayer. The chrome reflected his fractured face back at him. Jaw tight, eyes hollow with sleeplessness. But he could lose himself in the rhythm if he concentrated hard enough, in the mechanical precision of making everything pristine.

Clean the house. Fix what you can fix.

It didn't matter. The memory of this morning played over and over like cold water, like he was being relentlessly waterboarded. No reprieve. No way to breathe. All he could hear was Auden's alarm shrieking at 5:30, that aggressive electronic beeping that usually lasted no more than three seconds before her hand shot out to silence it. But this morning she'd been dead to the world, face buried in the pillow, auburn hair spilled across the white cotton like ink on snow. He'd watched the numbers on the clock change – 5:31, 5:32 – before finally reaching across her still form to kill the sound.

She'd looked so beautiful in sleep, peaceful in a way she rarely managed when awake anymore. There were new lines around her eyes, he'd noticed, fine as spider silk but there nonetheless. When had she started looking so tired? When had the vibrant woman who used to wake at dawn, just so they had enough time to curl into each other, start sleeping through alarms like the dead?

He'd slipped from bed without waking her, padding downstairs in boxers and a t-shirt with some half-formed plan of bringing her coffee, maybe toast with that expensive jam she loved. Let her sleep in for once. Be the considerate husband, the man who noticed when his wife was running on empty and did something about it.

But then Catherine had appeared in the kitchen doorway, hair wild from sleep, clutching her stuffed rabbit, and he'd gotten lost in the simple pleasure of making his daughter breakfast. Six years old and already so much like her mother – sharp and funny and entirely too perceptive for her own good. She'd chattered about how she wanted to sing in the Christmas program at school and how her friends always exchanged their biscuits with one another at lunch and the book Ms. McDonnell was reading to the class, and he'd found himself hanging on every word, guilty with the realization that he couldn't remember the last time he'd had a proper conversation with her. When had he become the kind of father who knew his daughter's schedule but not her thoughts?

So he'd let himself indulge. Made pancakes in the shape of animals the way she liked. Listened to her elaborate theories about why cats were better than dogs because Beans didn't bark and barking scared her. Helped her practice tying her shoes for the hundredth time because she was determined to master it before her next birthday in a few months. Time had slipped away like water through his fingers – 7:30, 8:00, 8:15 – and suddenly Auden was there in the threshold of the kitchen, beautiful and rumpled and unmistakably late, watching him with an expression of disdain.

That should have been the moment. Should have been sweet, father and daughter, morning light streaming through the windows, the domestic tableau she'd hinted at constantly. Instead, it had felt like an accusation, like evidence of some crime he didn't even know he'd committed.

The coffee maker came apart in his hands, every component scrubbed and rinsed and dried until it gleamed like new. As if Auden would come home and see the spotless kitchen and understand – see the hours he'd spent trying to make amends through bleach and elbow grease, trying to prove he was still the man worth coming home to.

The repetitive motion should have been meditative, but his mind churned like ocean water beneath sheets of ice, refusing to stay silent no matter how hard he worked to drown it out.

This is how it started with Jenni.

The thought arrived uninvited, unwelcome as a funeral guest. He pressed harder against the counter, knuckles white, as if he could scrape away the recognition blooming in his chest. But it was there, wasn't it? The familiar geography of distance. The way love could calcify into pointless repetition, passion cooling into politeness until two people became strangers performing marriage instead of living it.

He'd been so certain – so fucking certain – that Auden was different. That what they had was different. She didn't encompass Jenni's yielding acceptance but open disdain for his faults. Auden had sharp edges and honest hunger, a woman who looked at him like she saw straight through to his bones and chose to love what she found there anyway. Even now, remembering the fire in her eyes from their argument, that familiar pull twisted low in his stomach. She maddened him and intoxicated him in equal measure, made him feel like a man worth becoming instead of one worth performing.

So why does this feel like déjà vu written in blood?

The pattern emerged with crystalline brutality. Small disconnections multiplying like fractures in glass. The way they'd begun speaking past each other instead of to each other, their words finding empty air where understanding used to live. With Jenni, Charlie's birth had been the catalyst – a seismic shift when she'd turned inward and he'd felt suddenly, inexplicably exiled from his own life. But Catherine's entrance into their life hadn't done that. Auden had wanted her, had fallen in love with the life they had planned out, at least in the first few years. No, no matter how hard he tried to pinpoint it, there had been no obvious breaking point. Just this slow erosion he recognized with growing horror, like watching his own reflection in a funhouse mirror.

The rag slipped from his trembling fingers, hitting the floor with a wet slap that echoed in the sterile silence. His hands curled into fists against the marble. What if it's me? The question he'd been circling like a shark finally surfaced, teeth bared. What if I'm the poison that ruins everything I touch?

Two marriages. Two brilliant, complicated women who'd somehow slipped through his fingers like water, like smoke, like every precious thing he'd never learned how to hold without crushing. The panic crept up his throat, familiar as an old wound reopening.

But Auden was different, he reminded himself. Had to be different. When she looked at him with those knife-sharp eyes, when she whispered his name in the cathedral dark of their bedroom, when she laughed at something unexpected he'd said – she saw him. Really saw him. Not the curated version he performed for cameras and boardrooms, but the messy, uncertain man beneath the mask. Jenni had loved an idea of him, a projection. Auden loved the reality, scars and all.

Then why can't I shake the feeling that I know how this is going to end?

His phone buzzed against the counter like an angry wasp, screen lighting up with a cascade of obligations. Meetings. Calls. The afternoon stretched ahead, packed with conversations about budgets and casting and locations for the new film. Important conversations. Career-defining. The kind of opportunities he'd once killed for, back when ambition felt like oxygen instead of suffocation.

He stared at the phone, then at the crumpled rag on the floor. Every instinct screamed at him to cancel everything, to find Auden at the gallery where she'd gone to tend her wounds, to sit down and excavate the truth buried beneath their insults and jabs. To stop this drift before it became a chasm, before another marriage bled out in his hands.

But he couldn't. Wouldn't. The meetings were already set, investors flying in from three different coasts, his assistant having spent weeks coordinating schedules that moved like planetary alignments. People were counting on him. The project was counting on him. The responsible thing – the professional thing – was to go. To compartmentalize like a good soldier. To trust that he and Auden would find their way back to each other eventually, the way couples do in the movies.

Like you and Jenni did?

Cillian audibly groaned, leaning over the kitchen counter to bury his head into palms, the truth burning through his rationalization. He and Jenni had never found their way back. They'd just gotten better at navigating around the growing silence until one day they'd woken up as strangers sharing a bed and a child and not much else, their marriage a beautiful corpse neither had the courage to bury.

"Fuck me," he muttered to no one. "Fuck this. Fuck everything."

He bent to retrieve the rag, movements sharp with self-loathing. The kitchen gleamed around him, perfect and sterile as a magazine spread. Like a life performed rather than lived. When had his home start feeling like a set? When did his marriage start feeling like a role he was auditioning for every day?

When did loving Auden start to feel like effort?

The question lodged itself in his chest like a shard of glass. He thought of Auden's expression last night in Catherine's room, the way she'd looked through him as if he were already fading. Not the blazing fury he knew how to navigate – anger he could have worked with. This morning, he could have dragged her to their bedroom, lost himself in making her scream his name until she forgot why she was mad. Could've made her even later for work if their daughter hadn't been standing right next to him.

They had weaponized intimacy long ago, mistaking the temporary amnesia of pleasure for actual healing. They were addicts to their own destruction, using sex like a bandage over a wound that kept tearing open wider. It was the fundamental poison in their relationship and had been from the very beginning.

But last night, after it was all over, he noticed something colder. And he saw it again today, when he had told her he loved her as she walked out of the door and didn't say it back. It was acceptance, maybe. Like she'd been waiting for this particular betrayal all along, and he'd simply delivered it on schedule.

It was hard not to compare his first marriage to this. The similarities were too obvious, especially in the way Jenni had eventually stopped voicing her needs because she'd learned they fell on deaf ears. The way their passion had withered into performance, both of them going through the motions of desire they no longer felt. The way they'd become strangers sharing a bed, circling each other's pain with the careful distance of wounded animals.

But this is different, he insisted for the millionth time, to the voice that whispered otherwise. Auden isn't Jenni. What we have isn't that.

Their fights were almost foreplay now. All heat and collision and the inevitable crash into each other's bodies. Even when they drew blood, there was fire in it. Sometimes Cillian craved it, and the realization made his stomach turn. He'd catch himself manufacturing arguments, pushing buttons he knew would set her off, just to watch her ignite. The anticipation alone could make his pulse quicken – imagining her voice rising, her cheeks flushing, the way she'd advance on him with that dangerous glitter in her eyes.

He was pathetic. What kind of man got hard thinking about making his wife furious? What kind of father did it with their daughter in the next room? The shame sat heavy in his throat, but it never stopped him. In the middle of meetings his mind would wander to how the green in Auden's eyes disappeared when she fired up, how her pulse thrummed against his lips when he kissed her neck afterward, how weak her muscles got despite trying to convince herself to stop. He'd shift in his chair, hoping no one noticed, disgusted with himself yet already planning what he might say tonight to spark that beautiful, terrible fire again.

With Jenni, she had simply dimmed. Retreated to some unreachable place where his apologies couldn't follow. Auden still blazed, even in disappointment.

That had to count for something. Had to mean they weren't already over before they'd truly begun.

His phone buzzed again. Another reminder. Another obligation pulling him away from the only thing that actually mattered, like gravity in reverse. He wanted to hurl the device against the wall, wanted to watch it shatter into a thousand pieces that reflected his face back at him in broken fragments.

Instead, he picked it up, his knuckles dry and cracked from harsh chemicals, bright red blood blooming where the skin had broken. His eyes scanned the messages with practiced efficiency, his thumb moving across the screen like muscle memory. Without even glancing at the calendar on his phone, Cillian knew he would be late tonight.

With a controlled sigh, he shoved his phone into his back pocket. Cillian took a moment to glance around the kitchen. Not a single thing out of place, the evidence of his mishap wiped as if it had never occurred. It was clean, there was no doubting that, yet the memory would continue to stain him for the rest of the day.

Where are you bleeding out? The question followed him as he moved through the house, gathering his keys, his wallet, his forcing a mask of professional competence. What wound keeps opening no matter how carefully you tend it?

Maybe it was simpler than he wanted to admit. Maybe the problem wasn't the pattern – maybe it was that he kept choosing his career over his marriage, kept expecting love to be resilient enough to survive his absence, his divided attention, his assumption that it would always be there when he was ready to return to it like a loyal dog.

Maybe he was about to lose the best thing that had ever happened to him because he was too afraid to risk everything else to save it. Or maybe he was too proud.

Maybe Cillian couldn't face the truth that he was just a shitty fucking partner.

The garage door opened with a mechanical whir, and he stood there for a moment, keys heavy as anchors in his hand. He could still choose. Cancel the meetings. Find Auden. Fight for what they had before it slipped away, like every precious thing he'd never learned to hold without breaking.

But he was already walking to his car, already rehearsing the apologies he'd make tonight like lines in a script he'd read too many times before. Already choosing the safer path, the one that led away from the person who made him feel most like himself and most like a stranger all at once, because it was easier to avoid failure than to admit it.

Just like before. Always just like before.

Cillian settled into the driver's seat, the leather still holding the faint warmth of morning sun through the garage windows. He didn't start the engine right away. Instead, he sat there, hands resting on the steering wheel, feeling the schedule of the day pressing down on his shoulders like a lead blanket.

His fingers found the rearview mirror first, adjusting it a fraction of an inch even though it was already perfectly positioned. Then the side mirrors – left, then right – tiny movements that served no purpose except to give his restless hands something to do. The ritual of preparation, the illusion of control when everything else was spiraling away from him.

The silence in the car felt different from the silence in the house. Less accusing, somehow. Here, surrounded by metal and glass, he could almost pretend he was already somewhere else, already moving toward a different version of this day. One where he hadn't chosen work over Auden for the hundredth time. One where his daughter didn't look at him like a stranger during their stilted short visits. One where he didn't walk through the door of the home he owned and felt like a tenant in a short-term rental.

His next planned trip to LA wasn't until after Christmas. Three months away. Three months of this – the meetings, the conference calls, the endless dance of business that felt increasingly meaningless. He wondered how those months would unfold. Would Auden still be there when he finally found the courage to prioritize what mattered? Would Catherine still light up when he walked through the door, or would that too fade into polite distance?

The questions went unanswered and maybe they were simply unanswerable. He closed his eyes and tried to find that place of stillness that he had preached to Auden about years ago, back when her panic attacks and self-destruction were a nightly occurrence. Breathe in for four, hold for four, out for four. The meditation felt phony, like he was a snake-oil salesman who sold a a false product under a veil of gold.

He could still call Auden. The phone sat in the cup holder, screen dark but full of possibility. One call, one conversation, one moment of vulnerability that he knew she was owed. But even as the thought formed, he was already dismissing it. Auden was probably busy anyway. Probably better off without another round of Cillian's emotional whiplash.

That's when he saw them.

Charlie's football boots, muddy and grass-stained, sitting askew on the back seat. His son had left them there yesterday after practice, distracted by some video game waiting at home. Cillian had meant to remind him, but the teenager had already bound up the front steps and into Jenni's house before the words could form.

The boots changed everything. He couldn't go straight to work now – Charlie had practice tonight.

Of course, this was a flimsy excuse. Jenni would have handled it with her usual efficiency. She'd probably already arranged for someone else to bring backup boots, or she'd swing by a sporting goods store on her lunch break. She was good at solving problems.

He started the engine, and the familiar rumble filled the car like a heartbeat. The GPS would route him through downtown to get to Jenni's house, past the coffee shop where he and Auden had first met. Past the gallery Cillian had purchased for her as a peace offering, where she would be, trying to work but stewing over the way he continued to let himself play the victim.

Past all the ghosts that served as a reminder of how much had changed.

But first, Charlie's boots. One small thing he could get right in a day that already felt like it was slipping away from him. One moment of being the father he wanted to be, even if it was wrapped in the complicated mess of everything else he was failing at.

The house felt like a tomb as he backed out of the driveway, all that gleaming perfection mocking him through the rearview mirror. But first – first he had to stop at Jenni's. Just a quick stop, hand over the boots, and get back on the road to his perfectly scheduled destruction.

Simple.

When he arrived, Jenni answered the door in clay-stained jeans and a fitted black tank top, long raven-colored hair falling loose around her shoulders. Her hands were still dusty from whatever she had been working on, and there was a smudge of terracotta on her cheekbone that she either hadn't noticed or didn't care about. Still beautiful, but in that raw, unguarded way that had first caught his attention thirty-something years ago – back when her cool nature had felt like coming alive instead of being discarded.

Jenni didn't greet him, her almost-black eyes fixed on him with the kind of focus that made him feel transparent.

"Charlie's boots," he mumbled sheepishly, holding up the bag like an offering.

She lifted a single, tweezed brow.

"Right. Thanks."

She stepped aside to let him in, and he caught the familiar scent of clay and turpentine that seemed to cling to her this past year, earthy and sharp. For a moment, he felt like he was in his twenties again, when he was living with her in a shabby apartment above that noisy pub where his band used to play.

"Kettle is on. Tea should be ready. You look like you need it." Not an invitation, an observation delivered with that directness that had always unnerved him.

He should have declined. Should have handed over the boots and fled back to his car, back to his meetings, back to his wallowing avoidance. But something about the way she was watching him, with that slight tilt of her head that meant she was reading him the way she always did, parsing his moods like a language only she remembered, made him pause on her threshold like a mouse stuck in a trap.

"You look like hell," she commented, and there was no gentleness in it. Just matter-of-fact assessment delivered with clinical precision as she turned on her heel to walk back to the kitchen. He listened to the soft thump of her bare feet against hardwood.

Cillian pursed his lips, catching his reflection in the hallway mirror, and she was right. The sleepless night had carved shadows under his eyes, etched tension into his shoulders. He'd never been good at hiding strain, and Jenni had always been particularly – annoyingly, he should add – gifted at spotting the cracks in his armor.

"Just tired," he sighed, but followed her into the kitchen anyway.

She poured two cups of tea as he sat down at the island, the stool shifting beneath his bottom. He watched as Jenni added cream to his without asking – muscle memory, the ghost of intimacy that outlives love.

"Headed to the production office?" she asked him over her shoulder, as she plopped two sugar cubes into her cup.

"Yep," he replied, lips popping on the 'P'. Even with her back turned, Cillian could tell she was smirking.

"You don't sound too excited," she noted, turning back around. She placed two teacups on the counter but remained across from him.

Cillian responded with a shrug, reaching for the saucer. He slid it against the granite, the ceramic scrapping loud enough for Jenni to wince.

"Those are expensive," his ex-wife said. "Careful."

His finger curled around the stem of the teacup. He recognized the china – white with a gold rim and hand-painted lavender stems that curled around the curve of the base. They had received the set from Jenni's sister when they had first gotten married.

It was silent between them for a long while, both basking in the gentle rustle of the trees against the siding of the house and the occasional slurp of tea. Cillian knew he was intruding, could sense it in the way Jenni sighed as she set her teacup down, how she shifted her weight from one leg to another as her patience grew thinner with each passing breath.

"So," Cillian began rather awkwardly. "How's the pottery business going?"

Jenni rolled her eyes, arms crossing loosely over her chest. "What's going on, Cill? Why are you stalling?"

He blinked, his mouth opening and closing in mock disbelief as he searched for some sort of excuse. "Am I not allowed to enjoy tea with my ex-wife?"

"Not today," she responded without missing a beat. "I'm working on a big commission and have a bunch of bowls I need to glaze which means I don't have time to entertain you. So, tell me what you want."

Cillian ran his tongue across his bottom lip, wiping away the slight film that had developed there. "To be quite honest, I don't know, Jen."

"Is this about Catherine?"

Cillian felt his back straighten. "What?"

"Charlie's been asking me some questions lately." She leaned against the counter, eyes assessing him like he was a piece she was considering for her kiln. "About his sister. He's concerned. He mentioned that it to me the other day when he came home from one of their little outings."

Cillian caught the sound of his phone vibrating against the denim of his jeans. He ignored it.

"What has he said?" he asked, lifting the teacup.

"Just that she's quieter than usual. Making little observations about you and Auden that are far too sophisticated for a six-year-old." Her voice carried that familiar bite, the sharpness that had always made him feel like she could see straight through his bullshit. "Apparently she asked Charlie if all parents 'use their quiet voices when they're really angry' because that's what happens at her house now."

The tea turned to ash in his mouth. Catherine's words, filtered through Charlie's worried sixteen-year-old perspective, only to be delivered through the lens of Jenni's all-seeing mind.

Christ.

"He's protective of her, you know," Jenni continued, watching his reaction. "Says she gets this look when he drops her back off – like she's bracing herself. Sound familiar?"

It did. God help him, it did. The way Catherine had started lingered in doorways lately when he was home, hovering like she was testing the temperature of a room before entering. The way she'd grown quiet this morning, those blue eyes – so much like his own – darting between her parents like she was trying to decode some invisible language of disappointment.

"I don't – " he started, then stopped. Because he did know, didn't he?

Jenni's laugh was sharp.

"Oh, please. Don't insult my intelligence." Her arms went limp, coming to rest at her sides with a long sigh. "I lived through your version of 'not fighting,' remember?"

He set down his teacup with a sharp click that bounces off the walls of the kitchen. "That was different."

"Is it really?" She pushed herself forward, only to press her palms into the countertop to lean in towards him. Her hair fell over the straps of her top as she studied him with the patience of someone who'd once loved him enough to learn all his tells. "Because from where I'm sitting, you've got that same look you had when you two first broke up."

He wanted to argue, to list all the ways his marriage to Auden was stronger, more real, more true. But sitting in his ex-wife's kitchen, surrounded by the careful perfection Jenni had built from the ashes of what they'd once shared, the words wouldn't come. They lodged in his throat like stones.

"Where did we go wrong?" The question escaped before he could stop it, raw and desperate as a prayer torn from bleeding lips. "I keep trying to understand what happened to us, what I did wrong, because I can't –" He stopped, horrified by his own vulnerability, by the way need had stripped him bare in front of the woman who'd once promised to love him forever and embarrassed him all at once.

Jenni was quiet for a long moment, chewing on the inside of her cheek, her gaze faraway as she thought over her next words carefully.

"You really want to know?" she finally asked. "You're not going to like what I have to say."

He nodded, not trusting his voice, afraid that speaking would shatter whatever rare moment of fragile honesty was between them.

"You want to know where we went wrong?" she repeated softly and slowly, like she was still thinking this over. "We didn't go 'wrong,' Cillian. We just wanted different things, and we were both too proud and too scared to admit it until it was too late." She paused, gathering courage or strength or maybe just the right words. "You wanted to give me everything you thought I should want – the house, the life, the security. The whole beautiful package. And I wanted..."

She trailed off, shaking her head like she was trying to dislodge a thought that had gotten stuck.

"What?" His voice came out rougher than he'd intended, like he'd been screaming. "What did you want?"

"Something else. Something bigger. Something that wasn't this." She gestured around the kitchen, at the perfect suburban tableau she'd built for herself, every surface gleaming with the kind of cleanliness that spoke of emptiness rather than care. "I know how that sounds. I know how ungrateful it makes me, how selfish, especially with Charlie. But I felt like I was drowning in all that generosity of yours, like I was suffocating on everything you gave me."

"So, you found someone else." The words came out harsher than he'd intended, bitter as medicine, but he couldn't take them back.

Jenni flinched but didn't look away, meeting his anger with the steady gaze of someone who'd made peace with her choices. "I found someone who wanted the same life I thought I wanted. Someone who didn't make me feel guilty for not being grateful enough for everything I had, for not being enough to fill the space you'd made for me."

"And now?"

She smiled, and it was the saddest thing he'd seen in years – rueful and resigned and achingly honest. "Now I have exactly what I wanted."

Cillian's eyes fell to the nearly-empty teacup, staring at the small pool of Earl Grey that had grown tepid. Her words stung more than he allowed himself to show, which told him that she was right. And when Jenni spoke again, her voice was steady as steel, no whisper of vulnerability to soften the blow.

"And you want to know what really killed us in the end?" Jenni sighed, as if she had been waiting her whole life for this moment. "I tried to tell you all of this. Multiple times. But you were so terrified of conflict you'd rather let us both suffocate than risk an honest fight when you're the one in the wrong. You refused to hear what I was telling you, because for some reason, self-reflection terrifies you."

Cillian's jaw tightened immediately, his fingers drumming against the counter in that familiar staccato rhythm that meant she was getting too close to something real. She tilted her head to the side, trying to catch his eye, but he was already retreating – not physically, not yet, but in that way, he'd perfected during their marriage. The slight turn of his shoulders, the way he let his gaze fix on a spot just past her left ear.

"I wasn't drowning in your love, Cillian." Her voice dropped to barely above a whisper, each word deliberate and cutting. "I was drowning in your fear. Your desperate need to overwhelm me with grand gestures instead of just... listening. Instead of doing the hard work of actually changing."

His hand moved to his neck, rubbing at the tension there with more force than necessary. The criticism hit like it always did – making his chest tight, his breathing shallow. He could feel that familiar crawling sensation under his skin, the one that made him want to defend, deflect, do anything but sit with the uncomfortable truth of what she was saying.

"You thought if you loved me loud enough, dramatic enough, expensive enough, it would drown out the sound of everything breaking between us. But all it did was make the silence afterward that much louder."

Cillian's eyes snapped shut, his whole body going rigid. There it was – the flinch he couldn't hide when someone held up a mirror to his methods. His hands clenched into fists against the counter, knuckles whitening as if he could physically grip his way out of this conversation.

"That's not—" he started, then stopped, shaking his head sharply. The words came out rougher than intended, defensive in that way that proved her point exactly. He stood abruptly, the stool scraping against the floor, putting distance between them before she could dissect him any further.

"I should go."

But even as he said it, his body betrayed him. His shoulders hunched, arms crossed protectively over his chest. He looked like a man bracing for impact and he was sure Jenni realized he probably was. Her face was full of pity and frustration.

She watched him with narrowed eyes, seeing right through the performance. The way he wouldn't quite meet her gaze, how his breathing had gone deliberately controlled. She'd lived with him for years – she knew exactly what this was.

"Thanks for the tea," he muttered.

She didn't say anything as he moved toward the hallway, practically fleeing now. Don't follow me, don't push this, just let me go before you say something else that cuts too deep.

It was only when his left foot stepped through the entryway that Jenni decided she wasn't quite done.

"I will say this one last thing."

He froze mid-step, the urge to keep walking battling with the compulsion to hear her out. When he finally turned back, his face fixed his expression so it was utterly blank, but his hands were shoved deep in his pockets, fingers clenched.

Jenni's smile was sharp as a blade, knowing and merciless. "Auden will burn the house down before she'd let you turn her into a ghost the way you did me. The question is whether you're brave enough to let her – or if you're going to keep choosing the path of least resistance until she gives up and finds someone who actually has the balls to do the work."

Without a word, he turned and walked away, his stride just shy of running. Even in retreat, he couldn't handle the weight of her honesty – couldn't sit with the possibility that maybe, just maybe, that his ex-wife was right.