Chapter 3The Careless Heart

When I slipped back into bed, Eric, still asleep, instinctively pulled me into his arms.

"Babe…" he murmured.

That one word was all it took. Tears streamed down my face, hot and silent.

Moonlight filtered through the window, illuminating the framed photo on our nightstand. In it, we were in our high school uniforms. Eric was grinning, his canines showing, his arms wrapped around a map where he’d circled our two hometowns.

"Just wait," he had said. "The straight line between us… it’s only going to get shorter."

I had even planned to surprise him at our wedding by changing from my gown into that same school uniform. I’d imagined the look on his face, his eyes red with emotion.

But now…

How could this happen? The question echoed in my mind.

How could it be him? The boy who had loved me through college, grad school, and ten years of long distance without ever wavering. The man who always tilted the umbrella to cover me in the rain, who set all his passwords to our anniversary, who murmured my name in his sleep.

How could he turn around and offer that same tenderness to someone else?

For a decade, distance was an invisible thread connecting us. We grew on opposite ends, but our lives were always intertwined. We’d weathered so many storms together. The time I had a 104-degree fever, wrapped in a blanket, sobbing into the phone to him from across the ocean. The time he was mugged abroad and took three stab wounds to protect the ring he’d bought for me, only to brush it off as "just a scratch."

Six months ago, he’d secretly quit his high-paying job overseas and shown up at my office in a tailored suit, holding a bouquet of sunflowers—my favorite flower since high school.

"I told you," he’d said, lifting me up and spinning me around as I leaped into his arms, my dress flying. "The line was bound to get shorter."

We decorated our new home together. We booked the wedding venue. We told every friend from high school, every teacher, that we were finally getting married.

So why, when we were just one step from the finish line, did he get lost?

In that moment, I realized it wasn't just the physical betrayal that gutted me. It was that he was changing, becoming "better," for someone else.

For all the years he’d catered to my every whim, the one thing Eric wouldn’t do for me was quit smoking. No matter how many times I pouted or complained about the smell, he’d just laugh and kiss me. "A man needs his vices," he’d say.

I couldn’t accept it. He had finally quit for "me," but the real reason was another woman, one who probably said, "I don't want to taste smoke when we kiss."

The feeling was like being stabbed by the person you loved most in the world. Ten years of our lives felt like shattered starlight, glinting with memories that could no longer be pieced together into a picture of love.