LOGIN**Dominic**The therapist's office was aggressively neutral.Beige walls. A plant that looked fake but wasn't. Two chairs angled toward each other at the specific degree that was supposed to feel casual but didn't. A box of tissues on the side table that I had not touched and was not going to touch.Her name was Dr. Reyes. She was maybe fifty, with reading glasses she took on and off when she was thinking and a legal pad she wrote on occasionally without showing me what she wrote. She had not tried to make me comfortable. She had not smiled too much or leaned forward with performed empathy or asked me how that made me feel in the particular tone that made people want to leave.I had been here four times now.This was the first time I had said anything that mattered."Walk me through the plan," she said. Not accusatory. Just direct. "From the beginning. How you thought about her."I looked at the window. Outside, the city moved at its usual pace. Indifferent. Continuous."She was a mec
**Nadia**I let the silence sit for a full minute after he finished.Not because I didn't know what I wanted to say. I had known for three days. I had written it out in Lisette's kitchen at two in the morning with a cup of tea gone cold beside me, crossed things out, rewritten them, folded the paper, unfolded it, and eventually put it away because I did not need it anymore. The words had settled into me the way decisions settle when you have finally stopped fighting them.I looked at him across the table."You want a path back," I said. "That's why you're here. The letter, the divorce papers you signed but didn't send through lawyers, the voicemail. All of it was you asking without asking."He didn't deny it. "Yes.""Then I'm going to tell you what that path looks like. And you are going to listen without interrupting."He nodded once. Hands flat on the table now. Knuckles no longer white. The shaking had stopped somewhere in the last hour, replaced by something quieter and more atten
**Nadia**Three weeks had passed since the confrontation.I stood outside the small café on a quiet street in a part of the city that neither of us had any history in. That had been intentional. I had chosen it specifically because it belonged to neither of us, because there were no memories attached to the tables or the light coming through the windows or the bell above the door. Neutral ground. A place where the conversation could be what it needed to be without the weight of everything else pressing in from the walls.My coat pulled tight around my growing belly. Twelve weeks now. The bump had started to show in the last ten days, rounding out beneath fabric in a way that caught me off guard sometimes when I passed a mirror. A fact becoming visible. A thing that could no longer be carried only on the inside.Lisette stood beside me with her arm linked through mine. She had told me yesterday that she was coming and I had not argued because I knew better than to argue with Lisette wh
**Nadia**Three weeks had passed since the confrontation.I stood outside the small café on a quiet street in a part of the city that neither of us had any history in. That had been intentional. I had chosen it specifically because it belonged to neither of us, because there were no memories attached to the tables or the light coming through the windows or the bell above the door. Neutral ground. A place where the conversation could be what it needed to be without the weight of everything else pressing in from the walls.My coat pulled tight around my growing belly. Twelve weeks now. The bump had started to show in the last ten days, rounding out beneath fabric in a way that caught me off guard sometimes when I passed a mirror. A fact becoming visible. A thing that could no longer be carried only on the inside.Lisette stood beside me with her arm linked through mine. She had told me yesterday that she was coming and I had not argued because I knew better than to argue with Lisette wh
**Dominic**The void was back and it had swallowed me whole.I moved through the days like a machine that had not been switched off. My body kept going. It woke up. It showered. It put on clothes. It answered calls when it had to. But nothing lived inside it. No feeling. No pain. No heat. Just empty space where Nadia used to be.Week two of the story breaking and the world still tore at my name. Headlines kept coming. Stock kept dropping. Board members left messages that grew more urgent. I listened to none of it. I sat in the penthouse with the lights low and let the silence press down on me. The same silence I had known my whole life before her. Only now it felt heavier because I remembered what it had replaced.I could not feel the leather of the couch under my palms. I could not feel the cool air from the vents. My heart beat steady in my chest but it meant nothing. The numbness had returned fully and completely. Every inch of skin was dead again. The world touched me and slid rig
**Dominic**I sat alone in the penthouse with the television muted and every screen showing the same thing.*Dominic Marcello's marriage began as a revenge scheme.*The words sat in clean white font across every channel. Photos of Nadia and me from the early months, taken at events where I had stood close to her and told myself proximity was not the same as attachment. Old images of Garrett. Speculation filling the gaps between the facts she had chosen to release. My stock price had already moved. Board members were cycling through my phone in rotation. The PR team had sent eleven messages asking for direction in the last two hours.I gave them none.No statement. No denial. No call to the right people to apply the right pressure to kill the story before it metastasized. No press release threading facts into a more favorable shape. No lawyer drafting a threat. She had sent the bank transfer and enough of the contract to make the structure of it visible and I let it run exactly as she
My phone lit up with a message from a mutual friend. Priya wanted to meet. Alone. Coffee shop near the park. I stared at the screen for a long moment. Part of me wanted to delete it. Another part, the stronger part I had grown into, decided to go. I needed to face this.I walked into the coffee sh
I stood in the bedroom doorway, heart still racing from our charged conversation. Dominic watched me from the center of the room, his eyes dark with need and something deeper. The air felt thick between us. This time, I was not going to let him take control. I stepped inside and closed the door beh
**Nadia** I stood in the middle of the penthouse, arms crossed tight over my chest, staring straight at Dominic. The air still felt thick and heavy from our earlier fight, but I was done being quiet. I had walked out once. I had come back on my own terms. Now I was ready to change the rules com
**Nadia** I lay beneath Dominic in the dark bedroom, my body still trembling from the way he moved inside me tonight. This time was different. Slower. Deeper. More present than any night before. His weight pressed me into the mattress, but he held himself with careful control. Every thrust sank







