VOLUME I ACT I CHAPTER FIVE House of Cards (Part Three)
VOLUME I
ACT I
CHAPTER FIVE
House of Cards
(Part Three)
I didn’t leave my apartment the entire day after K’s brother visited. His words echoed through my mind like a bell that wouldn’t stop ringing. “Even if he never comes back.” That was the part that stayed with me. That was the part that terrified me.
I had built my life around a man I loved before he knew I existed. And now, the structure was threatening to fall. Not from lack of love, but from too much of it, poured into all the wrong places, at all the wrong times.
That night, I picked up the letter again. The one I’d written for K. I read it from start to finish, mouthing each word silently, feeling the weight of each confession.
I thought of giving it to his brother to pass along. But that would be cowardly. This wasn’t something to be filtered through anyone else. If I was going to save this marriage, if there was anything left to save, I needed to face the wreckage I’d created head-on.
So I didn’t send the letter.
I waited.
And waiting, as it turns out, is the loneliest kind of punishment.
The next evening, I got a text.
Come outside.
My heart stopped.
It was from K.
My fingers trembled as I grabbed my coat and stepped outside. There he was, leaning against his car like he had the night we first kissed. Like nothing had changed. But everything had.
He didn’t move until I was standing right in front of him. And then he handed me something.
My old phone.
I stared at it. I didn’t take it.
“I found it months ago,” he said quietly. “Didn’t open it at first. I told myself it wasn’t mine to open. But eventually, curiosity won. I saw the pictures. The notes. The timelines.”
My throat tightened. “And you said nothing?”
“I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know what it meant. At first I thought it was weird. Then I thought maybe it was fake. Maybe you had a twin. I didn’t want to believe it.”
I took a shaky breath. “And now?”
“Now…” he looked down at the phone, then back at me, “I don’t know how to feel. Part of me is angry. Another part of me is scared. But the biggest part?”
He paused.
“The biggest part is heartbroken. Because I thought what we had was born out of fate. And now I’m realizing it was born out of a plan.”
Tears spilled down my cheeks. “It was both. I planned to meet you. I didn’t plan to fall in love like this. I didn’t plan to become your best friend. Your wife.”
“I know,” he said softly. “That’s the part I don’t know what to do with.”
We stood in silence, cars passing slowly behind us, streetlights flickering on. I felt like a child who had broken something sacred.
“I’m not here to fix everything tonight,” he finally said. “But I need to ask you something. And I want the real answer. Not the one that sounds best. The real one.”
“Okay.”
“If I never became your boyfriend… if we never got married… would you have told me the truth?”
I hesitated.
And in that tiny pause, he nodded. “That’s what I thought.”
He turned, started toward the car, then stopped.
“But I still love you,” he said without looking back. “And that’s what makes this all so much harder.”
He got in and drove away.
And I stood there, holding a phone that was once my secret and was now a symbol of everything I might lose.
The days that followed were quiet again. But not like before. Not the calm-before-the-storm kind. More like the emptiness that follows one. People stopped texting. His family didn’t reach out. The friends we shared went radio silent.
I wasn’t just losing a marriage.
I was losing a life.
One night, I opened the hidden folder on the phone. I looked through every picture. Every note. And then, slowly, deliberately, I deleted them.
Not because I didn’t still love him.
But because love isn’t about possession. Or obsession.
It’s about choice.
And maybe, if I let go of the version of him I used to know, he might someday choose the version of me that’s standing in front of him now.
Not the girl who watched from afar.
But the woman who’s finally ready to be seen.
End of Chapter Six
