Chapter 4
371words
"What's wrong? Did you hear some rumor? Don't take those seriously... okay?"
His embrace was still warm, but his words seemed to come through frosted glass, blurry and distant.
I didn't struggle free, just lowered my head, looking at his profile partially hidden by his hair, and calmly asked:
"Then could you unlock your phone and let me see it?"
The air suddenly froze.
His arms around me stiffened, all pleading and explanations caught in his throat, leaving only silence.
This silence was deafening.
How could I have not seen it?
On that morning when my world collapsed, before I re-entered the room after a night of silence, his phone was lying on the coffee table in the living room, its screen lighting up at that exact moment.
That message saying "Come to think of it, we've been together for quite a while now."
Those nights when he was "working overtime,"
Those scratches he explained as accidental, covered with cartoon-patterned heart-shaped band-aids.
And I, his wife who had shared a bed with him for seven years, never once suspected anything.
An immense sadness flooded my heart; the most painful crying is truly the one without sound.
He suddenly burst into tears, large teardrops falling onto my hand, with a wet and slippery sensation.
"I was wrong... I really know I was wrong..."
He looked up, his eyes red-rimmed, explaining anxiously:
"There's really nothing between her and me! It's just... just that she sometimes resembles who you were years ago, that's why I... I just took a little extra care of her."
Resembles who I was years ago.
These words were like a final cold wind, extinguishing the last bit of light remaining in the depths of my heart.
That boy who would run across the entire city to buy me cake, that young man who cried and said he would quit school when I developed a rash from exhaustion, had finally been killed by time, and by himself.
The man kneeling before me now was just a stranger using someone who looked like me as an excuse to cover up his betrayal.
