Mine.
I had made partner at my firm, paid off the rest of my mortgage, and taken the Portugal trip Ethan always dismissed as “too expensive.”
One evening overlooking the Atlantic, I received a message from an unfamiliar number.
It was Ethan.
I was wrong. I thought marriage meant you would carry me.
I read it once.
Then deleted it.
Peace, I learned, was not loneliness. It was the absence of someone quietly calculating what they could take from me.
Because that was the lesson Ethan never understood until he
