Everyone Asked What I Did to Bring Down My Husband’s Empire the Morning of His Wedding Rehearsal — It Was the Wrong Question; the Right One Was Ask What I Kept

No shame.

Just my name, snapped down the line like an accusation.

“Adeline.”

I closed my eyes and let myself feel it, the fear in his voice — not gloating, exactly, but taking it in fully, the way you taste a thing you have gone hungry for a very long time.

“Roman,” I said.

“What did you do?” he demanded.

And there it was, the whole of him in four words: not what happened, not what’s going on, but what did you do — the assumption, even frozen, that if his world was ending it must be a thing done to him, never something he had done.

I opened my eyes and looked at the clear morning sky out the window of my cheap apartment.