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:

the country in seven days. I haven't told my boyfriend yet. How do I break

had

Selfish. Cruel. Heartless.

a future with him, of leading

And the worst part?

They were right.

my future, I chose

never truly

how absurd it all was, but my lips wouldn't move, frozen in

And yet...

it,

always been there, thin and almost imperceptible,

met, I was working a part-time shift at a bar when a drunk customer grabbed my wrist, pulling me closer with the kind

Pax had.

in, effortlessly peeling the man's fingers off my arm, his presence alone enough to make the guy

smooth and composed, as if confrontation was something he had been raised

he turned to me, gaze flickering over my face,

"Are you okay?"

been calm, steady. And before I even had a chance to answer, he had taken my phone, punched in his number, and saved

have known

quiet confidence, the unconscious authority-it wasn't something a struggling college student

he had smiled, easy and

a scholarship kid trying to

had been wearing? Borrowed from

needed a background actor to play a rich heir. Lucky me,

I had

more part-time jobs, thinking I was helping him the way he had