Joanne’s finger trembled over her phone screen.
Her Jeffrey, was standing beside Heather and... smiling.
Smiling like he didn’t have a woman waiting for him. Smiling like he hadn’t torn soone’s world apart. Smiling like he was whole. Complete. Like that was his family.
Joanne dropped the phone.
Her vision blurred as tears filled her eyes, and then...
They fell.
Heavy. Unstoppable. Like a dam breaking loose.
She curled in on herself at the edge of the tub, sobs shaking her thin fra. The water behind her still ran, unnoticed now, its gentle sound clashing with the grief spiraling out of her.
He had moved on.
Not just from her—but from them. From everything they’d been through. Everything she’d waited for. Everything she believed in.
Was she just a sumr fling? Would he rember her as just a redhead farm girl he fucked one sumr?
Was that why he asked her to stay out of it? So he could step in—fully—for Heather? For that child? For the life he chose without her?
She didn’t even know if the baby was truly his anymore. Otherwise, why was he with her? She didn’t know what was real.
All she knew was what wasn’t.
Her.
She wasn’t a part of this new picture.
And for the first ti in years—really, truly—Joanne felt small.
Forgotten.
Discarded.
She wrapped her arms around herself as she cried, knees tucked to her chest, and let the bath fill and overflow. The water spilled over the edge in gentle waves, soaking into the rug beneath her feet.
And she sat in it.
Not just the water. But the heartbreak.
The betrayal.
The silence.
The picture of him beside another woman.
And the sharp, cruel confirmation of what she had tried for a month to deny:
He wasn’t coming back.
Her tears had dried, but the hollow ache remained—quiet, gnawing, like a bruise on her soul she couldn’t press without flinching.
She stood up, knees trembling, and looked around at the dimly lit house that had once held his laughter, his scent, the weight of his footsteps.
No more.
Joanne cleaned herself first—scrubbed her skin until it tingled, until the scent of sorrow and sleep-deprived days lifted from her body. She changed the sheets. Swept the floor. Wiped every surface. Not for him. Not for anyone.
For herself.
It didn’t matter that he’d walked out and thrown her heart to the wind.
She would do what she knew to do—pick up the pieces with grace.
It hurt.
God, it hurt.
But she wasn’t going to rot in that pain anymore.
When the house was spotless, she stood before the door to the guest room—the one he had stayed in, the one she’d once tiptoed past, butterflies in her chest just thinking he was on the other side.
It was just a room.
Just wood and walls and a bed that had witnessed both her laughter and her heartbreak.
"This ends today," she whispered to herself.
She opened the door.
The room slled faintly like his cologne—warm, masculine, and painfully familiar. It was her house, her childhood ho, but for those brief months, he had made this space feel like it belonged to both of them.
Not anymore.
She walked in and began to pack. Neatly, precisely. That was how she worked—how she coped. Fold, place, seal. Like performing surgery on her own mories.
There wasn’t much. Just a few shirts, a book or two, so ties she used to tease him for actually knowing how to knot.
It had been three months. That’s all. Just three.
But sohow, he had etched himself into every corner.
The last thing she gathered were the photographs.
Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. Tucked into drawers, stuck on corkboards, hidden between pages of notebooks. He had photographed everything. Her hands cooking. Her smile mid-laugh. The way her hair curled after a shower. Her reflection in windows. Her sleeping form under sunlight.
She sat on the edge of the bed, trembling, and let her fingers glide over the glossy prints.
He hadn’t faked his love. She was sure of that. No man could fake that kind of affection—not in the way he had looked at her. Touched her. Captured her in these monts like she was his entire world.
Maybe... just maybe...
It had been real.
And maybe that was what hurt the most.
Because he hadn’t left her for lack of love.
He had left despite it.
Joanne swallowed the lump rising in her throat.
He chose his child.
How could she hate him for that?
It wasn’t her he betrayed. It was fate. It was life being cruel in the most calculated way.
She couldn’t hate him. She wasn’t built that way.
She hated herself for still loving him.
Her gaze landed on the cara—his beloved Pentax K1000 —perched on top of the dresser. It looked at her like it rembered everything. Like it carried the weight of his promises.
It wasn’t just a cara.
It was the cara.
The one he had handed her when he was just a boy, with a cheeky smile and eyes full of wonder.
She had waited. Even without her knowing, she waited.
He had forgotten her and abandoned her for fifteen long years.
And then he ca back. He made her fall in love with him all over again, only to leave once more. Not with cruelty like the last ti, but with silence.
That was worse.
Joanne walked over to the desk and picked up a pen. Her hand shook. Her heart threatened to tear in two again.
She wanted to write sothing profound. Sothing dignified.
But what spilled from her pen was the only honest thing she had left.
"You can have your cara back, jerk.
I’m done waiting for you."
She folded the note slowly, her tears blotting the corners. She wrote those words, but her heart whispered her true feelings.
I wish you all the happiness, Jeffrey...
Then, with the sa care she used to pack away her grief, she placed the cara in a box, cushioned it with tissue, and laid the note on top.
The next morning, while the sun rose behind a curtain of misty fog, Joanne walked down the empty street to the post office. The town was still rubbing the sleep from its eyes—quiet, soft, and grey. Her breath curled in front of her in little puffs. Her fingers were stiff from the cold, but she didn’t mind. She clutched the parcel to her chest like it was the last remnant of sothing sacred. Her heart was hollow. Her feet were steady.
She stepped into the warm, sterile light of the post office.
The package in her hands was light, deceptively so. A single cara and a folded note. Yet it weighed like a brick in her soul.
She stood in line, numb to the shuffle of others around her. When her turn ca, she placed the parcel gently on the counter and scribbled the address with care:
The Winchester Estate.
The clerk, a middle-aged woman with tired eyes and a kind smile, looked at her.
"Would you like to insure it?"
Joanne paused.
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