chapter 1

Liliana amerlys pov

“You’re impossible, Lila! Do you even listen to yourself when you speak?”

The words hit me like a slap across the face, sharp and cold, echoing off the high ceilings of the apartment we once called ours. Ethan stood by the window, his back half turned to me, one hand clenched so tight at his side his knuckles had turned white. The dim light of the streetlamps outside painted long shadows across his face, making him look like a stranger rather than the man I had loved for three years.

“Then tell me what I’m doing wrong, Ethan!” I shot back, my voice trembling with a mix of anger and hurt. My hands were shaking as I gripped the edge of the dining table, the surface scattered with half-folded laundry and unpaid bills—little reminders of the life that was slowly falling apart between us. “All I do is ask where you’ve been, why you come home at three in the morning reeking of alcohol and perfume, and suddenly I’m the problem? Suddenly I’m the one being unreasonable?”

He spun around then, his dark eyes blazing with a frustration that felt far too familiar these days. “Because you never stop asking! You never stop doubting me! Every time I walk through that door, it’s like I’m stepping into an interrogation room. Can’t you just trust me for once? Is that so hard for you to do?”

“Trust?” I laughed, but it came out hollow and bitter, tears stinging the corners of my eyes even as I fought to hold them back. “Trust is earned, Ethan! You don’t get to demand it while you act like you have something to hide. You used to tell me everything—where you were going, who you were with. Now you treat me like I’m some kind of burden you have to drag around. What changed? Did I become too much for you? Or did you just find someone easier to deal with?”

“Of course you’d jump straight to that conclusion,” he sneered, taking a step closer but not reaching for me, not like he used to when we fought. “You always think the worst. You’re so insecure, Lila. So needy and clingy. You suffocate me. Do you know how exhausting it is to have to explain my every move just to keep you from throwing a fit?”

His words cut deeper than any blade. Needy. Clingy. Suffocating. Those were the words he had started using lately, turning every ounce of love and care I gave him into something ugly and wrong.

“I’m not suffocating you,” I whispered, my voice cracking. “I’m just trying to hold onto what we have. Or what I thought we had. Do you remember when you used to say you loved how much I cared? When you said you felt safe because I worried about you? Now it’s all just a flaw to you, isn’t it? Everything I do is wrong. Everything I say is too much.”

“Because you do make it too much!” he raised his voice, making me flinch. “You make mountains out of molehills. Last week I came home late from a business meeting, and you didn’t speak to me for two days. Yesterday I took a call in the other room and you started asking if it was another woman. You’re driving me crazy, Lila! I can’t breathe when you’re watching my every move like a hawk.”

“Maybe if you didn’t act so guilty all the time, I wouldn’t have to watch you!” I shouted back, the dam finally breaking. Tears spilled down my cheeks, hot and fast, but I refused to look away. “You walk around here like you’re waiting for me to catch you at something. You lie about small things—where you ate, who you met. Why lie about coffee with a friend if there’s nothing wrong? Tell me that! Why turn a simple question into a war?”

“Because you blow everything out of proportion!” he roared, slamming his palm against the wall hard enough to make the picture frames rattle. “You take the smallest thing and twist it into proof that I don’t love you anymore. You want me to fail, don’t you? You want me to mess up just so you can say ‘I told you so’! That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You want to be right, even if it means destroying us!”

“I don’t want to be right!” I sobbed, my chest heaving with every ragged breath. “I want us to be right! I want the man I fell in love with back—the one who used to hold me when I was scared, who used to bring me flowers just because, who used to tell me I was his home. This man standing in front of me now? I don’t know him. He looks at me like I’m a nuisance, like I’m something he has to tolerate until he can find a way out.”

“Then maybe you should stop looking so hard for problems!” he snapped, his tone turning cold and dismissive. “Maybe if you focused on something other than me and our relationship, you wouldn’t feel so empty all the time. You have no life outside of me, Lila. No hobbies, no friends you see anymore. You just sit here and wait for me to come home, and then you pick apart every second of my day. It’s pathetic, honestly. It makes you look so weak.”

The word pathetic landed like a punch to the gut. I felt my knees go weak, but I forced myself to stand tall, even as my heart shattered into smaller pieces. “Pathetic? Because I chose to build my life around you? Because I believed you when you said you wanted to build a future with me? You told me to quit my job because you said you could provide, that you wanted me to stay comfortable. You told me to stop hanging out with my friends because you said they were a bad influence. And now you call me pathetic for doing exactly what you asked?”

“I didn’t ask you to lose your mind in the process!” he shot back, his face twisted with disgust. “I wanted you to be happy, not turn into someone who questions my every breath. Look at you—crying and screaming, making a scene over nothing. Do you know how exhausting it is to come home to this every single night? I work all day, I deal with stress and pressure, and the last thing I need is to walk through that door and be attacked by you!”

“Attacked?” I repeated, letting out a bitter laugh. “I’m asking you to love me, Ethan! I’m asking you to treat me like your partner, not your enemy! Is that too much to ask? Am I really so terrible that wanting affection, wanting honesty, wanting to feel like I still matter is asking for the impossible?”

“You’re making it impossible,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, venomous tone that made my blood run cold. “You turn love into a prison. You turn every conversation into an argument. Nothing I do is ever good enough for you. If I stay out late, I’m cheating. If I come home early, I’m up to something. If I give you attention, I’m smothering you. If I give you space, I don’t care. There is no winning with you, Lila. No matter what I do, you find a way to be unhappy.”

“Because you’ve stopped trying!” I screamed, the pain in my chest so intense it felt like it would stop beating altogether. “You stopped looking at me like I was the most beautiful woman in the room. You stopped asking how my day was. You stopped holding my hand, or kissing me goodnight, or telling me you love me unless you have to. You act like being with me is a chore. And then you have the nerve to stand there and say I’m the one ruining this?”

“Maybe you are,” he said cruelly, crossing his arms over his chest. “Maybe we’ve just outgrown each other. Maybe you need more than I can give, and I need less than you’re willing to take. This relationship feels like a weight around my neck, and you’re the one tightening the rope.”

His words were like poison, seeping into every crack of my heart. I stared at him, at the coldness in his eyes, and realized in that moment that the man I loved was gone. Whatever warmth had once existed between us had been replaced by resentment, anger, and a complete lack of respect.

“A weight?” I whispered, wiping my tears away with the back of my hand, my voice turning sharp and hard. “After everything I’ve done for you? After I supported you when your business was failing, when no one else believed in you? After I stayed up all night taking care of you when you were sick, after I forgave you for every mistake you ever made, after I put your needs above my own for years? Now I’m just a weight?”

“You’re twisting things again,” he said, rolling his eyes as if my pain was nothing more than an annoyance. “I’m not saying you didn’t do anything. I’m saying that what we have now isn’t working. And it’s not just me—you feel it too. You’re just too stubborn to admit that maybe we’re not right for each other anymore.”

“I feel it,” I admitted, my voice shaking but clear. “I feel that you’ve stopped loving me a long time ago. I feel that every word out of your mouth is meant to hurt me, to make me feel small so you can feel better about being the one who’s failing us. You blame me for everything because it’s easier than admitting you don’t have the decency to be honest. You’d rather tear me apart than just say ‘I don’t love you anymore’.”

“Because you’d throw a fit if I said that!” he snapped. “You’d make a huge drama out of it, just like you’re doing now. You can’t handle the truth, Lila. You can’t handle anything that doesn’t fit into your perfect little fantasy of what our life should be.”

“And you can’t handle being a decent human being!” I fired back, my anger rising to match his. “You’d rather call me crazy, call me insecure, call me everything under the sun, than face the fact that you’re the one who changed. You’re the one who stopped caring. You’re the one who broke every promise you ever made. And now you want to blame me for not being able to live with the pieces?”

“I don’t want to blame you,” he said, though his tone said otherwise. “I just want some peace. I want to come home and not feel like I have to defend myself. I want to breathe without feeling like I’m being watched. Is that really too much to ask?”

“Peace?” I asked, stepping closer, my voice laced with disbelief. “You want peace at the cost of my dignity? You want me to stop asking questions, stop feeling hurt, stop feeling anything just so you can do whatever you want without having to answer to anyone? That’s not peace, Ethan. That’s just you wanting to do whatever you please while I stay quiet and pretend I don’t see it. That’s not love. That’s just using someone until they’re too broken to say anything back.”

“See? This is exactly what I mean!” he shouted, throwing his hands up in the air. “You turn every single thing into a battle! I can’t even speak without you turning it into a fight! You make me hate coming home, Lila. You make me hate the life we built. I look at you now and I don’t see the woman I fell in love with. I see someone bitter, someone angry, someone who takes all her frustration out on me!”

“And I look at you,” I said, my voice breaking again, “and I see someone I don’t recognize. I see someone who enjoys hurting me. Someone who finds satisfaction in making me cry. You think I want to fight? You think I like spending every night screaming and crying? I’d rather be happy. I’d rather go back to how things were. But you’re the one who changed the rules! You’re the one who moved the goalposts every time I got close. You made me doubt myself, Ethan. You made me feel like I was going crazy for feeling the way I do.”

“Because you are going crazy!” he yelled, his face red with rage. “You’re so consumed by fear and suspicion that you can’t see anything clearly. You push me away with every word, and then you wonder why I pull back! You want me to be close, but you treat me like a criminal. How am I supposed to love someone who thinks the worst of me all the time?”

“How am I supposed to love someone who treats me like I don’t matter?” I shot back, my throat raw from shouting. “You walk around here like you’re doing me a favor just by existing in the same room. You talk to me like I’m stupid, like I can’t understand anything. You dismiss my feelings like they’re nothing more than an inconvenience. Do you know how degrading that is? To love someone with everything you have, only to have them look at you like you’re nothing?”

“Then stop loving me so much if it makes you so miserable!” he spat out, the words hitting me like a physical blow. “If everything I do is wrong, if I make you feel so terrible, then why are you still here? Why do you keep clinging to me if I’m such a monster? Go find someone who can live up to your impossible standards! I’m tired of trying to be enough for you when nothing I do ever will be!”

“Because I believed in us!” I screamed, tears flowing freely now. “Because I thought that love meant working through the hard parts, not throwing it away the moment things get difficult! I thought that when you said ‘for better or worse’, you actually meant it! But you? You run from every problem. You turn every disagreement into a reason to hate me. You’d rather end everything than just talk to me like a partner, like someone you once cared about!”

“Cared about?” he repeated, scoffing. “I do care, but you drain every last bit of it out of me! Every time we fight, a little more of what I feel for you dies. And you just keep doing it, over and over again, like you want to kill what’s left of us. You’re your own worst enemy, Lila. And you’re destroying whatever is left of this relationship with your own two hands.”

“Or maybe it was already dead long before this argument started,” I said quietly, suddenly feeling exhausted—so tired of shouting, so tired of crying, so tired of trying to make him see what was right in front of his face. “Maybe we’ve been walking around a corpse for months, and you just want me to pretend it’s still breathing. You want me to smile and act like everything is fine while you treat me like garbage. But I can’t do that, Ethan. I can’t pretend to be happy when every part of me is hurting.”

“Then don’t pretend,” he said coldly, turning away again as if the conversation was already over. “If you’re so unhappy, then leave. I’m not stopping you. Maybe some time apart will do us both good. Maybe you’ll realize that you’re the one making this harder than it has to be.”

“Leave?” I whispered, the word tasting like ash in my mouth. “You say it like it’s so easy. Like three years of memories, of plans, of all the promises we made can just be walked away from. But you’ve already checked out, haven’t you? You’ve been gone for months. You’re just waiting for me to get tired enough to go so you don’t have to be the bad guy.”

“Think whatever you want,” he said, his voice flat and final. “I’m done arguing. I’m tired of this. I’m going to sleep in the guest room. I can’t stand to look at you right now.”

As he turned to walk away, he paused for just a second, glancing back over his shoulder with a look of pure disdain. “And Lila? Next time you decide to make a scene, remember this: no one wants to be with someone who is always looking for reasons to be hurt. You did this to us. Not me.”

Then he walked out, slamming the door shut behind him so hard the walls shook, leaving me alone in the silence of the living room—alone with my tears, alone with the pain, alone with the cruel words that hung in the air like thick smoke.

I sank down onto the floor, my legs finally giving out, and buried my face in my hands. Every word he had thrown at me replayed in my head, sharp and unforgiving, each one cutting deeper than the last. Needy. Clingy. Pathetic. The problem. The reason we were failing.

And somewhere, through the fog of my own heartbreak, I didn’t know yet that this fight was only the beginning—that the man who would change everything, the one who had watched from the shadows for far too long, was already waiting in the wings, ready to step in the moment Ethan pushed me far enough.

TO BE CONTINUE