Chapter 5

Cassie POV:

He stayed out late again. The hours dragged by, marked by the escalating silence of the apartment. I cleaned. I packed. I systematically dismantled the life we had supposedly built together. With each item I placed in a box, each surface I wiped clean, I felt a layer of grime being scrubbed from my soul.

His social media, which I'd sworn off, still found a way to infiltrate my consciousness. Brenna, bless her persistent heart, kept sending me screenshots. Kiera, posing with Ethan at a charity gala, her hand possessively intertwined with his. He was smiling, a genuine, dazzling smile that he rarely bestowed upon me anymore. He looked at her with a certain adoration, a kind of protective tenderness that made my stomach churn. It was the look of a man deeply invested, deeply charmed.

I scrolled past it quickly, not allowing the image to sink in. My resolve was a fragile thing, but it was hardening with every passing hour.

The next morning, I drove to my parents' house. They were already worried; my voice on the phone had been too thin, too brittle.

"Cassie, honey, what's wrong?" my mother asked, her eyes searching mine as I walked through the door. My father, usually stoic, put down his newspaper and looked at me with an unusual intensity.

"I called off the wedding," I said, the words falling flat in the cozy living room.

My mother gasped, placing a hand over her heart. "What? Why? Is everything alright with Ethan?" Her immediate concern was for him, of course. They adored Ethan, the charming, successful lawyer.

"No, Mom. Everything is not alright with Ethan," I replied, forcing a tight smile. "It just... wasn't going to work. We decided to go our separate ways." I kept the details vague, a shield against their inevitable disappointment and questions. I couldn't bear to rip open the wound of his betrayal for them, not yet.

My father cleared his throat. "Are you sure, sweetheart? Ethan seemed... dedicated. He's a good man." His eyes held a subtle, unarticulated skepticism, a slight flicker of doubt about Ethan, which I hadn't noticed before, but it was there, now that I looked.

A pang of guilt pricked me. I was keeping the full, ugly truth from them. But they loved me, and protecting them from the true extent of his deceit felt like the last act of kindness I could perform in this whole sordid affair.

"I'm sure, Dad," I said, my voice firm. "It's for the best. I'm going to take that fellowship, after all. Start fresh."

They looked at each other, concern etched on their faces. They wanted me to be happy. They just didn't understand the depth of unhappiness I had been living in.

The next few days were a whirlwind of activity. I forwarded my mail, changed my address. I closed accounts, transferred money to a new, private one only accessible by me. I sold off our joint assets quickly, efficiently, leaving Ethan with a hefty sum from the sale of my car and a generous portion of the apartment's equity. I didn't want his money. I didn't want anything that reeked of him. My dignity was worth more than any material possession.

Finally, with a sense of grim satisfaction, I blocked Ethan's number. And then Kiera's. And then, for good measure, I blocked him on every social media platform, deleting my own accounts where necessary. I wanted no trace of him, no possibility of him finding me, no window into the life I was meticulously building without him.

A serene, almost eerie calm settled over me. It was the peace of utter detachment. The apartment, now nearly empty, felt vast and silent. The echoes of our life together were fading, replaced by the quiet hum of my own breath. I was reclaiming my space, physical and emotional.

Ethan, lost in his self-appointed heroics, was still completely oblivious. The subtle changes in the apartment, the slow disappearance of my belongings, the quiet shift in my demeanor-he hadn't noticed any of it. He was too busy being the center of Kiera's universe to even register the slow implosion of ours. And that, I realized, was the perfect cover. His blindness was my invisibility cloak.

This was it. The perfect moment to slip away. The last administrative tasks were done. The airline ticket was purchased. My old life was packed into two suitcases, waiting by the door.

That evening, I ate a solitary meal on the kitchen floor, surrounded by bare walls and the ghost of a shared past. A single fork, a paper plate. It felt fitting. My future was just as stark, just as unburdened.

I looked at the empty space where his books used to be, where his framed photos of Kiera and her son once sat. He had been so proud of his role in their lives. He had been so blind to the wreckage he caused in ours. My soul, which had been crushed and suffocated for so long, felt as if it were slowly, painstakingly, unfurling its wings.

He had promised me a future, and delivered a lie. But the lie, inadvertently, had set me free.