Title:The Silence Between the Apologies
Seven years earlier, Eliot had been someone else.
Back then, he had a wife named Mara, a laugh that filled rooms, and a belief that love—real love—was unbreakable if you wanted it badly enough. They met in college, married young, and built a life out of shared coffee cups and inside jokes.
But love doesn't usually die in explosions.
It dies in delays.
Eliot started choosing work over conversations. Deadlines over dinners. Silence over honesty. And when Mara began asking questions—real questions—he answered with irritation instead of truth.
The truth was simple and ugly:
He was afraid of becoming ordinary.
When Lena joined his office, she saw him before he remembered how to be seen. She admired his intelligence, his restraint, his sadness. And Eliot—stupid, flattered, tired—confused admiration with meaning.
The affair lasted four months.
Mara found out in five minutes.
She didn't scream.
That hurt more.
"I don't know who you are," she said quietly, folding his shirts with surgical calm. "And that scares me more than the betrayal."
Eliot begged. Promised. Explained.
Mara listened.
Then she left.
Two weeks later, she was hit by a drunk driver on her way home from work.
She survived.
Barely.
But the woman who woke up in the hospital had lost part of her memory—specifically, the last year of her life.
Including the affair.
Including the divorce papers she had already signed.