After the Last Tear: Rising from the Ashes of a Broken Marriage By Cassila K

Chapter 66

Pax was gone.

Not just gone erased.

His things had disappeared overnight, vanishing so cleanly that if not for the faint indentation his side of the mattress still held, I might have thought he had never been here at all.

The small, suffocating apartment we had shared for the past two years now felt eerily... spacious.

I stood in the center of the room, staring at the empty space where his belongings used to be. The closet door, once barely able to close from the weight of our combined mess, now hung slightly ajar-hollow, unburdened.

Even his scent, that faint mix of cedar and citrus, was already beginning to fade.

He hadn't left a note.

No message. No half-hearted explanation scrawled on a scrap of paper.

Nothing.

Just silence.

I swallowed, exhaling slowly

So, that was it, a clean break.

A quiet, unspoken ending.

Maybe this was for the best.

This way, at least, I wasn't the one who had to walk away first.

Two days ago, I had posted a question online on Reddit:

I haven't told my boyfriend yet. How

had

Selfish. Cruel. Heartless.

future with him, of leading

And the worst part?

They were right.

him and my future, I chose

had never truly

all was, but my lips wouldn't

And yet...

it,

always been there, thin and almost imperceptible, but there

working a part-time shift at a bar when a drunk customer grabbed my wrist, pulling me closer with the kind of entitlement that

Pax had.

effortlessly peeling the man's fingers off my arm, his presence alone enough to make the guy stumble back with a mumbled

just defended me—he had handled the situation, smooth and composed, as if confrontation was something he had been raised

gaze flickering

"Are you okay?"

I even had a chance to answer, he had

should have

carried himself—the quiet confidence, the unconscious authority-it wasn't something a struggling

smiled, easy and unbothered, and

a scholarship kid trying to get

suit he had been wearing?

to play a rich heir. Lucky me, huh?

had

more part-time jobs,