“You’re saying the marriage is dead,” she said.
“I’m saying if you can’t trust me, maybe we shouldn’t be married.”
It was a line he had probably imagined as powerful. It landed like a child threatening to run away from a house he didn’t own.
Carissa stepped aside from the doorway.
“Then don’t sleep here tonight.”
He stared. “What?”
“You heard me.”
He laughed under his breath. “You cannot kick me out of my own bedroom.”
“Watch me.”
For a moment, he looked like he might challenge her physically. Then something in her face made him think better of it. He grabbed a pillow from the bed, muttered something about her being unbelievable, and went downstairs.
Carissa stood alone in the bedroom they had once painted together on a weekend in June, the room where he had promised her a family “someday, when timing makes sense,” the room where she had stayed up through the night after her father died and listened to him breathe while she understood that grief was lonelier beside a sleeping person than it was alone.
She sat on the edge of the bed and did not cry.
Instead, she called her office, left a message canceling her eight-thirty meeting, and then she grabbed her coat and keys.