He didn’t turn around.
Looking back, that should have been the detail that stopped me cold. Instead, my eyes went straight to the woman.
She was sitting beside him on a bench, sobbing into her hands, and Callum had his arms wrapped around her, pulling her against his chest. I stood frozen in the middle of the path for what felt like a full five seconds, and in that stretch of time, every strange thing he’d done over the past month rearranged itself into the ugliest possible story.
The late nights. The way he’d started angling his phone away from me. The vague, clipped answers whenever I asked if something was wrong. Three nights earlier he’d come home almost two hours late, and when I’d asked if it was work again, all I got was a flat “yeah.”
Twelve years of marriage, and Callum had never once been a man who made me wonder where he actually was. Until that month.
A Touch That Broke Something in Me
I moved closer to the bench. “Callum?”
Still nothing. The woman lowered her hands, said something to him, then rested her fingers on his forearm. He turned toward her instantly.
That small gesture did more damage than anything else that afternoon. He could hear her. Not me.
