Chapter 4

"He told me I was imagining things," I said to Emily, my voice flat. We were in her car now. I had refused to go with Mark, a small act of rebellion that had earned me a look of pure hatred from him before he sped out of the hospital parking lot. Emily had insisted on taking me to her place.

"For months, he made me feel like I was going crazy," I continued, staring out the window at the passing city lights. "I'd find receipts for expensive dinners I wasn't at. A hotel confirmation for a 'business trip' I knew nothing about. He had an answer for everything."

Emily just listened, her hands tight on the steering wheel.

"Chloe was just a friend. The team needed a morale boost. The hotel was a booking error. On and on. And he'd say it with this look on his face, this look of pity. Like he was so patient, dealing with his unhinged, hormonal wife."

I finally turned to look at her. "The worst part is, I started to believe him. I thought, maybe I am crazy. The lack of sleep, the grief... maybe it's all in my head."

"It wasn't in your head, Sarah," Emily said, her voice firm.

"I know that now," I said with a bitter laugh. "One night, I couldn't take it anymore. He was supposedly at a late-night meeting. I called his office. The security guard said everyone had left hours ago. So I got in the car. I drove to her apartment. And his car was parked right out front."

I remembered sitting in my own car, staring at the building, the windows dark. I didn't go up. I didn't pound on the door. I just sat there for hours, the engine off, the cold seeping into my bones, feeling my entire world collapse in on itself.

"I confronted him when he got home at 3 a.m.," I said. "He smelled like wine and her perfume. He didn't even try to deny it that time. He just looked at me, completely bored."

I could still hear his voice, dripping with disdain.

"So what if I was? Can you blame me, Sarah? Look at you. You haven't showered in three days. The house is a mess. All you do is mope around and cry. Chloe is fun. She's ambitious. She makes me feel alive. You... you just drag me down."

Those words had hollowed me out completely. In his eyes, my depression wasn't a disease, it was a character flaw. My grief wasn't a process, it was an inconvenience. My pain was a burden he was no longer willing to carry.

From that day on, I just... gave up.

I stopped asking where he was going. I stopped caring when he came home. I let him and Chloe have their victory. He wanted a life without the messiness of my grief, and I was too tired to fight for a place in it.

"I used to be someone, Em," I whispered, the words catching in my throat. "I was a good architect. I won awards. People respected me. I had a vision, a future."

Now, my blueprints gathered dust in my home office, a room I hadn't entered in months. My name, which used to be on mastheads and project proposals, was now just on prescriptions for antidepressants I couldn't bring myself to take.

Mark had taken everything from me. My son, my husband, my career. And now, my sanity. I wasn't Sarah Miller, the architect, anymore. I was just the crazy wife he kept locked away in our perfect glass house, a problem he wished would just disappear.

Emily pulled the car into her driveway and turned off the engine. The silence was heavy.

"He didn't take it, Sarah," she said, her voice quiet but intense. "He didn't take anything. You just put it down for a little while. And we're going to pick it all back up again. I promise."

I wanted to believe her. I desperately wanted to believe her. But the woman who had designed skyscrapers felt like a stranger, a ghost from a past I could no longer access. All that was left was this empty shell.