Chapter 2

Kacey Morton POV:

The next morning, I was sitting across from my best friend, Juliana Lowe, in a quiet café downtown. The steam rising from my coffee cup did little to warm the chill that had settled deep in my bones.

Juliana, a family law attorney with a mind as sharp as her tailored blazer, stirred her latte, her gaze fixed on me. "You're serious," she said. It wasn't a question.

"As a heart attack."

She leaned back, her expression a mixture of shock and something that looked suspiciously like relief. "Kacey, I've watched you love that man like he hung the moon. You planned your entire career around his, moved into his firm to support him, decorated your home exactly to his sterile, minimalist tastes. You learned to love black coffee because he does."

"I'm tired, Jules," I whispered, the words feeling thin and inadequate. "So incredibly tired of trying."

Then I told her the rest. "She's back."

I didn't need to say the name. Juliana's eyes hardened instantly. She knew. Of course, she knew.

Isabelle Humphrey. The name had been a splinter under my skin for five years. A constant, low-grade infection in my marriage. Blake was obsessed with privacy, a fortress of passwords and locked files on his computer, his phone off-limits. "I need my space, Kacey," he' d say if I ever so much as glanced at a notification on his screen.

Yet, his old college social media accounts, the ones he claimed to have forgotten the passwords to, were a public gallery of his time with her. Photos of them kissing, captioned with inside jokes I' d never understand. He' d made me his wife but kept her his public history.

The splinter dug deeper. I remembered the first time he took me to his favorite Italian restaurant, insisting I try the gnocchi. "It's the best you'll ever have," he'd promised. It was only later, when I saw a photo of him and Isabelle in that same booth, an empty plate of gnocchi between them, that I realized he wasn't sharing his favorite dish with me; he was reliving a memory with her.

He had spent five years with me, trying to recreate a life he' d had with someone else. I wasn't his partner; I was a stand-in, a ghost actress in the revival of his own past. He hadn't just neglected me; he had actively tried to erase me, to mold me into a shape that fit the void she' d left behind.

"I'll have the paperwork drafted by the end of the day," Juliana said, her voice firm, pulling me from the spiral of painful memories. "Are you sure, Kacey? Once we file, there's no going back. You know how he is. He'll fight you."

"I know," I said. "He' ll see it as a challenge to his authority, not the end of a relationship."

Juliana had warned me about him from the beginning. "He looks at you like you're a beautiful painting he just acquired," she' d said after our wedding. "Not like the woman he can't live without." I hadn't listened. I' d believed love was something you could build, that my patience and devotion would eventually be enough.

"You know," I said, looking out the window as the sky began to darken, "it's like everyone tells you the stove is hot. But you don't really understand what 'hot' means until you touch it yourself."

A sudden downpour began, the rain hammering against the café's large windows, blurring the world outside. A few minutes later, Juliana' s fiancé, a kind, gentle man named Mark, appeared with an umbrella.

"Thought you might need this," he said, handing it to her before kissing her softly on the forehead. "Ready to go?"

"Almost," she said, her eyes softening as she looked at him. "Kacey, do you need a ride?"

The easy affection between them, the casual, unthinking care, was a stark contrast to the calculated transactions of my own marriage. Blake and I didn't have that. We had schedules and obligations. We had a shared address and a shared last name, but our hearts resided in different cities.

"No, I'm good," I said, forcing a smile. "I'll wait for the rain to let up."

I watched them leave, huddled together under the single umbrella, a perfect picture of partnership. The question echoed in my mind, one I had been pushing away for years. Why was it so hard for Blake to love me? Was I not smart enough? Not beautiful enough? Not... enough?

The rain streaked down the glass, like tears on a cold face. And then, the answer hit me with the force of a physical blow, so simple and so devastating.

It wasn't about me at all. I could have been the most perfect woman in the world. It wouldn' t have mattered.

He just didn' t love me enough. And he never would.