Total pages in book: 24
Estimated words: 22495 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 112(@200wpm)___ 90(@250wpm)___ 75(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 22495 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 112(@200wpm)___ 90(@250wpm)___ 75(@300wpm)
First Christmas. He made reservations but I cooked instead. The chicken was terrible. He ate all of it.
He turned the photo over. He remembered that Christmas.
Game day. He didn't know I was in the building. Row 14, Section 308.
Eleven photos. Eleven moments she had documented in a shoebox while he was downstairs doing any of the thousand things he did without noticing.
He went through the entire box, but there was not a single photo of his wife. Not one. He didn’t know why that bothered him so much. He only knew that something about it wasn’t right. He closed the box, but the feeling only worsened. That unnamed thing in his chest that was tightening painfully.
He went through the rest of her things until he found a desktop calendar in her drawer. It was one of those freebies given away by companies during the holidays or product launches. And his wife, even though she had access to his money and could buy anything she wanted...
Laina had always been the type to keep these and use them herself because she hated any kind of waste.
Troy slowly flipped through the calendar, starting with the first month of the year. Every date box had something written on it. Mostly about to-dos for work, but there were also notes about them, marked with pink hearts. Unfortunately, many of them were crossed out. And he remembered all of them. These were all the things that he had to cancel because something had always come up: a meeting, a call, a deal that couldn’t wait. And his wife had become the last of his priorities.
A pattern began to emerge as he studied the months that followed. She was just as busy as he was with her job. But she still had her menu for home-cooked dinners pre-planned, and he remembered how he had come home too late to share them with her.
It worsened as the number of crossed-out notes increased...in reverse proportion to the hearts that marked them. Soon enough, she didn’t even bother to draw any kind of heart. And afterward, she wasn’t even using a different pen to mark the dates where she and Troy were supposed to be together.
Everything was written in black.
And last month, she had stopped writing anything about him.
But in the margins, in a different hand than Laina's, someone had written a phone number next to the words Aunt Trisha called. Troy stared at it. He didn't think much of it at the time.
And seeing this, month by month, the record of his wife giving up on him, had that unnamed feeling in Troy’s chest turning into a sinkhole. And when Troy looked around the room he once shared with his wife, he could finally see what had been happening throughout their entire marriage.
Laina was still the same girl he had married seven years ago.
But it was Troy who had changed.
Troy who had forgotten why he had married her in the first place.
A few minutes ago, he hadn’t been able to understand why it bothered him, seeing her shoebox full of photos of him but there was not a single photo of Laina. Or of them.
But now, standing alone in this big, fancy house that he had thought would be enough to make Laina feel happy...
He understood now that it should have been him.
The way Laina had taken those photos because she had cherished her time with him.
He should have been the one taking photos of her.
If he had remembered why he had married her.
If he had not lost himself in chasing his own dreams at the expense of their marriage.
Troy, too, should have his own stash of photos. Maybe not in a shoebox like she did. But in his phone at least. Because when he thought about it now...he remembered the countless times he would glance her way, see her reading a book, and he would think she was the most beautiful girl in the world. Those were the moments he would be tempted to take his phone out and take a photo of her. But he never had.
Because he had also believed this day would never come.
The day when his wife would leave him.
Because he had hurt her for the last time.
I d-don’t love you anymore.
Chapter Two
THE SILENCE IN LAINA’S new apartment was deafening.
It was something she had never experienced, and honestly, something she had never thought she’d have any reason experience. Since her job meant being around children who were at that age when noise and energy were non-negotiables, silence was usually a rarity, and a blessing because of it.
But now, though...
She had been sitting on the floor for twenty minutes, her back against the wall, her knees drawn up, her phone facedown in her lap. And throughout it, all she could hear was the sound of her own breathing.