✧ ❈ ✧If Distance Was A Room✧ ❈ ✧

❈ ❈ Alessia Pov ❈ ❈

The drive home felt like it took a whole three days instead of twenty minutes.

I didn't cry. And that was actually the weird part. I thought I would cry the whole way back, but my body was doing something else. My hands gripped the steering wheel so tight my knuckles were white, and I kept checking the mirror to make sure the person driving was actually me.

Edward's car was in the driveway when I pulled up.

I sat in the car for a minute, engine off, just staring at the house we'd bought together, picked out paint colors for and I had been so sure it was the start of our forever. The word "forever" feels like a joke now.

When I went inside, he was in the living room.

"Alessia—"

I didn't look at him. Just walked past him toward the bedroom.

"Alessia, wait. We need to talk about this."

I kept walking.

"Please." He followed me, his voice got soft and desperate. "Let me explain. Stella called me—she told you, didn't she? She told you everything."

I closed the bedroom door and locked it.

For two days, I didn't speak to him. Not at dinner or when he stood outside the door. Not when he slid notes under it that I never opened. I moved through the house like a ghost, took my showers when he was at work (he still went to work, like the world hadn't just ended), and slept in the guest room with a chair wedged under the doorknob.

By Saturday, I needed air.

I took a book I wouldn't read and a phone I would use and went outside to the patio. The sun felt warm on my skin but didn't warm anything on the inside. I sat in the lounge chair and stared at the pool we'd never had time to use.

My lawyer's number was already in my phone. I'd pulled it up every morning this week, staring at it like it might bite me.

I called.

"I need a divorce," I said when he picked up. No hello. No preamble. Just the fact of it, solid and undeniable. "My husband has been having an affair. The woman is pregnant. I'm seven months pregnant with his child. I want full custody. I don't care about child support or the house. I just want a full custody of mu baby. And I want him out of my life by Monday if that's possible."

My lawyer—Tom, a man who'd handled several marriages cases successfully.

He didn't sound shocked. Maybe he'd heard worse. Maybe everyone in the world had heard worse and I was just now catching up.

"I will draw up the initial papers," he said. "You can expect them by the end of business Monday. Have him sign and we'll file."

"What if he doesn't sign?"

"Then we go to court. But Alessia—" he paused. "Are you safe?"

Was I safe? Was I?

"I'm fine," I said. "Just make the papers."

I hung up and sat there in the sun with my phone still in my hand, waiting to feel something. Relief. Satisfaction. Closure.

I felt nothing.

That's when Edward came out.

"Alessia." He stood in the patio door like he was asking permission to exist. "Can we please just talk? For five minutes. That's all I'm asking."

I didn't answer. Just kept staring at the pool.

He came and sat on the edge of the lounge chair, not quite touching me. His hair looked messy. He hadn't shaved. For some reason, that made it worse—that he looked like he'd been suffering too, like his face was allowed to show what he'd done.

"I don't know how it happened," he said quietly.

"Then you're a liar and an idiot," I said flatly.

"It was a mistake—"

"A six-month mistake?"

"I was confused. I was feeling disconnected from you and—"

I turned to look at him then. Really looked at him. At the face I'd kissed a thousand times. The mouth that had told me he loved me while he was busy loving someone else.

"How could you do this to us?" My voice cracked on the last word. "After everything we've been through? Everything I've sacrificed for you?"

Edward's jaw clenched. "I know—"

"Do you?" I sat up, and suddenly the tears were there, hot and angry. "Do you know what it's like to give up everything for someone? To believe in them so completely that you stop believing in yourself? To let them be your entire world?"

I wiped my face with the back of my hand.

"You're going to hear from my lawyer on Monday," I said, my voice steadier now. Colder. "He's drafting the divorce papers. You're going to sign them, and then you're going to get out of my life."

Edward's face went pale. "Alessia, no. Don't do this. Please don't do this."

"It's done."

"My father—" Edward stood up, started pacing. "My father won't allow this. He won't let you just take his grandchild. He'll make sure you never see—"

"I'm carrying your child," I said. "Not his. Mine. And when this baby comes out of my body, it's going to have my blood. My DNA. My name if I want it to. Your father can threaten whatever he wants, but I'm not giving this baby up. I'm not afraid to lose you. But I will never lose my baby."

Edward turned to me, and I'd never seen him look so broken. His eyes were red. His hands were shaking.

"Please," he said. "Please don't do this. I'll end things with Stella. I'll do anything. Anything you want. Just don't leave me."

I looked at the man I'd built a life with, who'd shattered it like it was made of glass—and I started crying. Not gentle crying. The kind that comes from somewhere deep and rotten inside you, where all the betrayal lives.

"You should have thought about that before," I said.

Edward came toward me, tried to take my hand, and I let him. I don't know why I let him, but I did. He sank to his knees in front of the lounge chair, his forehead against my seven-months-pregnant belly where his child was living and growing, and he sobbed.

And I cried with him.

Not because I forgave him. Not because I was considering his pleas. But because somewhere in the last few days, I'd died. The woman I had been, the one who believed in him, who sacrificed for him, who loved him so completely it erased everything else—was gone.

And I was mourning her.