“Please take me with you, and we can try to fix this,” I said desperately.
He finally looked at me, and his eyes were empty.
“There is nothing left to fix,” he said quietly. “Everything we built was based on lies, and there is no foundation to rebuild from.”
“What about the love we shared?” I asked through tears.
“It was real,” he admitted softly. “But it belonged to people who did not truly exist.”
He left a few days later without saying goodbye, and I watched him walk away knowing he would never return.
Now I live alone in the house that once held our life together, and the silence feels heavier than ever before.
Tyler calls me regularly, and he still calls me Mom with the same warmth, but every time I ask about Daniel, the answer is always the same.
“He is doing fine,” Tyler says gently. “But he never asks about you.”
I sit in the quiet living room after those calls, listening to the ticking clock, understanding that this loneliness is not something that happened to me.
It is something I created.
