That night you told me you were tired of fighting and that we should just end everything, I begged you not to decide something like that while we were both angry.

But you walked away anyway.”

The message ended, and I stood frozen in that sterile corridor while the false narrative I had carried for six months came apart in my hands.

She had not left me.

I had told her we were done, in a fit of exhausted pride, and she had begged me to wait, and I went the next morning and hired a lawyer, and then, over the months that followed, my ego had thoroughly rewritten the entire memory until I believed she was the one who had abandoned me.

The recording in my ear was the truth I had deleted, in every sense of the word, without ever knowing I had done it.