The morning I chose myself

*Alexandria's POV*

I didn't sleep.

I lay on the guest room floor with my back against the bed frame, my suitcase beside me like a quiet accomplice, and I watched the sky outside the window shift from black to grey. My hand kept drifting to my stomach without permission. A habit I was already forming for someone I hadn't even met.

By five in the morning, the house was still. Jamie hadn't come back.

I stood up slowly, every muscle in my body protesting from yesterday's ordeal. My lower abdomen still ached with a dull, persistent throb that the hospital painkillers were losing their fight against. I ignored it. I had a narrow window and I wasn't going to waste it feeling sorry for myself.

I changed into jeans, a plain black top, and flat shoes. No silk. No diamonds. No costume. I pulled my hair into a low bun and looked at myself in the mirror above the guest dresser. I looked ordinary. I looked like a woman nobody would glance at twice.

Good.

I picked up the letter I'd spent three hours writing and carried it to our bedroom. I set it on his pillow, smoothed it flat, and stood there for a moment longer than I intended. The room smelled like him — cinnamon and that expensive soap and something underneath it that was just Jamie. I had spent five years learning that smell. Loving it even when the person wearing it treated me like a piece of the furniture.

I walked out without looking back.

Downstairs, I set my suitcase by the front door and went to the kitchen to drink a glass of water. The doctor said hydration. I was going to be someone's mother now. I had to start thinking like it.

The glass was halfway to my mouth when I heard it.

The front door.

My whole body went cold.

I set the glass down without a sound and stood very still, listening. The measured, unhurried sound of footsteps crossed the foyer. Not Elaine. Elaine shuffled. These steps were deliberate. Controlled.

Jamie walked into the kitchen.

He was still in last night's clothes — jacket gone, shirt slightly open at the collar, a tiredness around his eyes that he would never in a million years admit to. He stopped when he saw me. His gaze moved from my face to my clothes to the glass of water on the counter. Something shifted behind his eyes.

"You're up early," he said.

"So are you," I replied. "You didn't come home."

"I slept at the office." He moved to the coffee machine and started it without asking if I wanted any. Classic. "Go get dressed. The anniversary dinner reservation is at seven. I want you ready by six."

I almost laughed. I genuinely almost laughed.

"Jamie."

"The black Valentino," he continued, not looking at me. "And wear the diamond set. The photographer from the lifestyle magazine will be there. I need us looking—"

"Jamie." My voice was sharper this time.

He paused. Turned.

I held his gaze and I didn't flinch. "I'm not going to the dinner."

The coffee machine hissed and gurgled between us. He stared at me with that look — the calibrating one, where he was deciding whether I was bluffing or broken. He had always been able to tell the difference. That was his power over me for ten years.

"What did you just say?"

"I'm not going," I repeated. Steady. Quiet. Final.

He set his mug down slowly. "Alexandria, I don't have the patience for this today. Whatever this is — the attitude, the rebellion — I need it to stop. We have obligations—"

"I was in the hospital yesterday," I said. "I bled in the garden. I woke up alone in a public ward. Elaine called you four times." I paused. "You didn't come."

Something crossed his face. Fast, like a shadow. Gone before I could name it.

"I explained that. My phone—"

"Was with Sarah." I nodded slowly. "Right."

I walked out of the kitchen. He followed.

And that was when he saw it.

The suitcase.

It sat beside the front door exactly where I had left it — modest, grey, and damning. His eyes landed on it and stayed there. The silence in the foyer was a living thing.

"What," he said quietly, "is that."

"You know what it is."

He turned to me, and for the first time in five years I saw something on Jamie Grayson's face that I had never seen before. Not anger. Not cold indifference. Something that cracked right down the middle of his composure and didn't quite know what it was yet.

"You're leaving." It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

"Today."

"Yes, Jamie."

He laughed. It was short and hollow and it didn't reach anywhere near his eyes. "Over a missed phone call. Over one dinner. You're being dramatic, Alexandria. Leave the bag upstairs and go get dressed."

I picked up my suitcase.

He moved. Faster than I expected — one hand closing around my wrist, not rough but completely immovable. His jaw was tight. His eyes were doing something complicated that I refused to decode.

"Put it down," he said quietly.

"Let go of my wrist," I said.

"Where are you going to go?" His voice dropped lower. That dangerous, controlled low that used to make me want to appease him immediately. "Back to your middle-class life? To Kendrick?" He said the name with a particular kind of contempt. "You think he's going to give you this?" He gestured at the house around us.

I looked at him. At the hand around my wrist. At the confusion he was wearing like it was costing him something.

"I don't want this, Jamie." My voice cracked on the last word and I hated myself for it. "I never wanted the house. I wanted you. And you were never actually here."

He stared at me. The muscle in his jaw worked once. Twice.

His phone rang.

He didn't move.

It rang again.

He glanced down. Sarah's name lit up the screen like a verdict.

I pulled my wrist free and he let me go this time. I reached for the door handle.

"Alexandria."

I stopped but I didn't turn around.

"Don't." Just one word. Rough at the edges in a way I had never heard from him. "Don't walk out of that door."

My hand was still on the handle. My heart was slamming against my ribs. My stomach ached and my eyes burned and every single part of me that had loved him since I was sixteen years old was screaming at me to turn around.

I turned the handle.

The cool morning air hit my face.

And then his hand landed flat against the door above my head, pushing it shut.

"You're not going anywhere," he said, low and close, his breath warm at my temple. "Not today. Not like this."

I closed my eyes.

*Damn him.*