Chapter 4Divorced Three Years Ago

The dreams started. Night after night, I saw him standing beside someone else. Not me, but Vivian—someone who was his intellectual equal, who understood him in a way I never could.

In my dreams, I was always running, but I could never catch up to him. I’d call his name, but he would never turn around...

He must have noticed my spiraling mood. One night, after we made love, he pulled me close, his arms wrapping around me. "Honey," he whispered, "work has slowed down a bit. How about we finally plan that wedding?" He traced a line down my spine. "I can take a couple of weeks off. We can go on a proper honeymoon, get away from everything. How does that sound?"

Just like that, with a few soft words, he reeled me back in.

But planning a wedding was far more complicated than I’d ever imagined. Even with a wedding planner, I obsessed over every detail: the venue, the menu, the flowers. This was my one and only wedding, and it had to be perfect. Just designing the wedding favor boxes had me pulling all-nighters, pouring more of myself into it than I ever did for my final thesis.

That evening, I excitedly showed Caleb the final designs. He was on his laptop, but he glanced up for a fraction of a second. "Yeah, looks good. They’re fine."

I hesitated, chewing on my lip. "I can't decide between these two. This one holds more, but this one is more elegant... what do you think?"

He was typing a message to someone, a faint smile on his face, but he remembered to answer me. "Either one is fine."

Suddenly, I had nothing left to say.

Sensing my silence, he closed his laptop and pulled me onto his lap. "Honey, what were you saying?"

I forced a smile. "It's nothing. Go on, finish your work. It's not important."

A week before the wedding, I dropped off his lunch as usual. I had just gotten home when the wedding planner called. There was a last-minute change to a crucial part of the ceremony, and I had to choose between two options immediately. I couldn't decide, and Caleb wasn't answering his phone.

Panicked, I rushed back to his office. But as I reached the entrance, I froze.

I saw Caleb, his face a mask of indifference, scraping the meal I’d made for him into the trash.

Vivian was leaning against the wall nearby, arms crossed. "You really don't know how good you have it, do you?" she teased. "Your wife treats you like a king, and you're still not satisfied?"

Her words were playful, but his reply was dead serious. "Do you think I wanted to waste it? We got so caught up in the project review that it was ice-cold by the time I got to it."

"Alright, alright, I get it," she said, laughing. "My treat today. What are you in the mood for?"

Caleb set the now-empty lunchbox aside, his movements clean and practiced, as if he’d done this a thousand times before. He sighed, a strange look on his face. "Sometimes... she's just too good to me. It's so much that it... it feels like pressure."

In that moment, the sour, rotten stench of discarded food seemed to rise from the bin. A wave of nausea hit me, and I fled.