Too Late, Ex-Husband: The Wife He Lost

Shila pov

The first time I coughed up blood, I told myself it was nothing.

It was the morning of our fifth wedding anniversary, and I stood over the bathroom sink with my fingers gripping the cold marble, staring at the red drops against the white porcelain as though they belonged to someone else. My chest ached in a deep, strange way that no amount of breathing could ease, and the mirror showed me a woman who looked tired in a way sleep had stopped fixing months ago.

I turned on the tap and watched it all wash away.

*Stress,* I decided. *Or the weight of a marriage that is quietly slipping through your fingers.*

I had become very good at explaining things away.

Kairus had left before dawn again. His side of the bed was cold and perfectly smooth, and there was no note on the pillow, no message on my phone, nothing to suggest he remembered what day it was. But I remembered. And I refused to believe that a man who once promised me forever in front of two hundred guests had truly forgotten.

So I decided to remind him.

I spent the morning hanging fairy lights along the staircase and arranging white roses down the long dining table, my hands trembling the entire time. I lit candles. I laid out the cream tablecloth from our first apartment and set two places at a table that had felt far too big for two people for a very long time.

"Madam, you should rest," Miss Grace said from the doorway, twisting her apron between her fingers. She had worked in this house longer than I had lived in it, and she had a way of looking at me that made lying impossible. "You are very pale."

"I'm fine," I said, smiling the smile I had perfected over five years. "I just want it to be perfect."

"And has he called?"

"He will. He's just busy."

She pressed her lips together and said nothing, which was how I knew she didn't believe me.

I climbed the stepladder to hang the last strand of lights above the window, and that was when the room began to tilt. The lights blurred into streaks of gold. My breath came out thin and wrong. And I thought, very clearly, *Oh. This isn't stress.*

Then the floor rose up to meet me, and everything went dark.

---

The tests took the entire afternoon.

Blood work, scans, a long silent hour inside a machine that hummed around me like something alive. Miss Grace refused to leave my side through any of it. She sat in every plastic chair they offered, clutching her handbag, her eyes never leaving the door.

By the time the doctor called us in, the sun had sunk low enough to paint his office in amber light, far too gentle for what came next.

He did not sit behind his desk. He pulled a chair around and sat across from me, close enough that our knees almost touched, and that was how I knew. People do not sit that close to give you good news.

"Mrs. Everdeen," he said, "the results are not what we hoped for."

I folded my hands in my lap and kept my spine straight. I had learned long ago, on racetracks and in boardrooms and in the silence of my own marriage, that if you hold your body very still, you can almost convince the rest of you to stay together.

"You have an aggressive form of cancer. It has already spread to your lungs and lymph nodes." He drew a slow breath. "I'm so sorry. Based on how advanced it is, we are looking at approximately nine months."

Nine months.

Beside me, Miss Grace made a sound I will never forget, something old and faithful breaking in half. She pressed both hands over her mouth and rocked forward, tears pouring down her cheeks.

"No," she gasped. "Not her, God, not her. She is only twenty-eight. She has given everything to that house and that man, and she has never asked for anything back."

I wanted to comfort her. I truly did. But I could not find the part of me that knew how.

All I could think was that I had once raced motorcycles at two hundred miles per hour and felt more alive than anyone on earth. I had folded that girl away like a dress I would never wear again, because a man had asked me to build a life with him and I had believed love meant making myself smaller.

And now I had nine months.

"Is there a chance it's wrong?" I heard myself ask, in a voice so calm it startled me.

He looked at me with such tenderness that I wished he had simply lied. "I wish I could say yes."

I nodded slowly. Then I thanked him, which is a strange thing to do to the man who has just ended your life.

---

Miss Grace cried the entire drive home.

I sat in the back seat holding her hand, watching the city slide past in smears of light. Cars, people, glowing storefronts. The world had not noticed that mine had just ended, and somehow that felt like the cruelest part.

"You must tell Mr. Everdeen tonight," she said hoarsely.

"I know."

"He will want to be there for you."

"I know," I said again, and I realized I was holding onto the thought like a lifeline. For all his coldness, for all the silence, he was still the man who had once held me through a thunderstorm and promised nothing would ever hurt me. Maybe he had only been buried in work. Maybe tonight, in the candlelight, when I finally told him everything, he would look at me the way he used to.

It was a foolish hope. I knew that even as I let myself have it.

When we pulled up to the house, the windows glowed softly with the fairy lights, exactly as I had imagined. Kairus's car was already in the driveway.

My heart lifted, the stupid, hopeful thing. I climbed out slowly, one hand pressed to my ribs, and told Miss Grace to wait. "Let me do this alone."

---

He was standing in the middle of the living room in his dark suit, his tie loosened, his back to me. He had not touched the roses or the candles or the table I had set. He stood among it all as though it were something he had simply walked through on his way somewhere else.

"Kairus," I said.

He turned, and I did not recognize his face. The man I married had warm eyes and a crooked half-smile he saved only for me. This man had neither. His expression was composed, cold, and perfectly empty.

"Sit down, Shila."

"I need to tell you something," I said. My voice shook, and I hated it. "Something happened today, and I—"

"This won't take long." He crossed to the dining table, picked up a thick folder that lay beside my careful place settings, and held it out. "Read it. And sign."

I took it because my hands moved before my mind could stop them. The heading was printed in bold black letters across the top page, and I read it once, twice, three times, waiting for the words to rearrange themselves into something else.

'DIVORCE AGREEMENT.'

The candles flickered low behind me, throwing shadows across the walls I had decorated for a husband who had already decided to leave.

"What... is this?" I whispered.

He met my eyes without a flicker of feeling.

"Divorce papers."