There was a pause.
A small one, but it stretched long enough to make my stomach tighten.
Daniel exhaled.
“Fine.”
Amanda didn’t let him off.
“That doesn’t sound enthusiastic.”
Daniel gave a humorless little chuckle.
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to say what you’ve been dancing around since Mike’s wedding,” Amanda replied.
My fingers froze on the keyboard.
Daniel’s voice turned quieter. More honest.
“It’s not that anything’s wrong,” he said. “Genesis is good. She’s steady. She’s loyal. She’s responsible.”
Each compliment landed like an insult.
He wasn’t describing the woman he loved. He was describing the woman he settled for.
Amanda murmured, “But?”
Daniel’s voice cracked just barely.
“But sometimes I wonder if steady is enough.”
My heart slammed against my ribs.
Amanda sighed.
“It’s marriage, Dan. The passion doesn’t last forever.”
“I know,” Daniel said. “But what if it was never really there to begin with?”
Right then, sitting in the garage with a wall between us, I realized the whisper at the wedding hadn’t been the betrayal.
It had been the warning.
This was the proof.
I stayed exactly where I was.
Not because it didn’t hurt, but because moving would have meant admitting I was still hoping to hear something that could save us.
The garage felt colder somehow. The air thicker. The walls seemed to lean closer as Daniel kept talking.
Amanda didn’t respond right away.
I heard the soft clink of a wine glass being set down.
“What do you mean?” she asked carefully.
Daniel laughed, but there was no humor in it.
“I mean, what if I married Genesis because she was safe?”
There it was.
The sentence I didn’t know I had been bracing for.
“She was there,” he continued. “She wanted the same things. Marriage. Stability. A future that made sense on paper.”
My throat burned.
I had loved him with my whole chest, and he had loved me like a checklist.
Amanda’s voice softened.
“And you don’t feel that way with her?”
Daniel hesitated.
“It’s different.”
Different.
That word people use when they are trying to avoid saying less.
“With Melissa,” he continued, and my name disappeared from his mouth like it had never belonged there, “it was intense. Messy. Real.”
I closed my eyes.
I could picture her without trying. Dark hair. Loud laugh. The woman he had told me was just history.