Coming home to an empty house feels like a well-needed solace from the mediocre marriage I was living. I do miss the thought of him. I don’t miss the twilight saga.
Still, despite how strong I feel most days, I shake my head sometimes and wonder — wow. That easy. He left that easy. No call. No sign of him trying to reach out, trying to fix, trying anything at all.
The building is on my way home, so I drive past it often — the cargo van and his jeep parked there now, like they’ve always belonged. And I think: wow. I’m driving past a building I spent a quarter of a million dollars fixing up, like I never had any business with it at all. Like none of it was mine to begin with.
It makes me wonder how much sooner I should have called it enough.
I don’t have a clean answer for that. What I know is this: the ease of his leaving wasn’t proof I didn’t matter. It was proof the fight I kept bracing for was never going to come from him — not before, not after, not now. The house is quiet now, and some days that quiet still surprises me. But it’s not empty in the way I feared it would be. It’s just finally honest.