I had braced for evidence that I was too much, too broken, the anchor dragging his life under. Instead, I found a trail of questions and confessions that read like prayers: How do I love her when she’s in too much pain to be touched? How do I stay strong when she believes she’s ruining my life? He wasn’t hunting for an escape route. He was scavenging for language, for scripts, for any fragile tool that might keep us from shattering.
His secrecy didn’t erase the nights my body felt like a battlefield or the rage I hurled at my own reflection. But it reordered the story. I wasn’t the burden I’d made myself into; I was the beloved he was desperately trying to hold onto. In the glow of that stolen midnight, I saw it clearly: the distance between us wasn’t proof of his indifference, but of how fiercely he’d been loving me in the dark, even when I’d already given up on myself.