MF_writer
“Are you really going to do it?”
Dorian’s hands closed around mine, and his voice cracked. “Are you really going to get rid of our child and end everything we’ve shared?”
For five years, I hid my face. I stayed in private rooms and knew to not attend dinners.
I was a debt that my husband paid in silence.
“Yes.” I replied.
I pulled my hand from his hold and carrying my bag, walked straight to the departure lounge, one way to Lisbon.
•*•*•*•
Five years ago, Liora shoved her husband out of the way of a falling studio gantry. She lost the left side of her face and the anchor’s chair she had spent seven years earning. Dorian married her out of guilt, then kept her hidden.
On their fifth anniversary, she finds letters. Five years of them, every one written to Seraphine, the first love he never stopped reaching for. The last one ends: ‘Come home. I will tell her after the anniversary.’
Liora refuses to wait to be told. She signs a job offer in Lisbon, gives herself thirty days, and vows to be divorced before Christmas. But Dorian answers “Not now.”
Seraphine moves into the guest wing for the holidays, and Ansel, the childhood friend who left her life at eighteen, walks back into it. He is the only person who looks at her scar and doesn’t look away.
Thirty days to leave. A first love who won’t go home. A ‘friend’ who never stopped looking. And one night that was never supposed to change anything.
How do you walk away from a man who has only just learned how to stay?
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