I helped him pick out his tie. It was a deep blue silk, the one I gave him for his birthday. He was nervous about seeing everyone again. I kissed his cheek and told him to have fun.
“I’ll be back before midnight,” he promised.
He went to his 20-year reunion alone. I had offered to go, but he said it would be boring for me since I didn’t know anyone from his hometown.
He didn’t come back before midnight. He came back at 2:00 AM, smelling of cheap punch and old memories. And he was… strange. He came back different. Distant.
For the next week, he was a ghost in our house. He stared at his phone. He smiled at nothing. He flinched when I touched him.
Then came the conversation that erased almost two decades of my life.
“I can’t do this anymore, Sarah,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed, refusing to look at me.
“Do what? What’s wrong?”
“Us,” he said. “He told me he realized he had ‘settled’ for me“.
The word hung in the air like a slap. Settled. As if our marriage, our home, our life was just something he accepted because he couldn’t get what he really wanted.
“Settled?” I whispered. “We’ve been married for eighteen years. You chose me.”
“I chose you because I had to,” he corrected. “He said he settled because his high school girlfriend had moved away back then.“.
I felt sick. I was the consolation prize he picked up because the grand prize had left the state. I was the placeholder he used to pass the time.
“And now?” I asked, my voice trembling.
“She was back in town now,” he said, a flicker of excitement in his eyes that I hadn’t seen in years.
They had reconnected at the reunion. The spark was still there. And apparently, that spark was worth more than the life we had built.
He threw away our 18-year marriage for a nostalgia trip.
He packed his bags to go stay with a woman he hadn’t really known since he was seventeen. He was willing to burn down our reality to chase a “what if” from two decades ago, leaving me to realize that for eighteen years, I hadn’t been the love of his life; I was just the person keeping his seat warm until she came back.
