Someone Had to Stay

Even then, even after everything, a part of me was still holding the door open a crack, still half-hoping to be surprised.

He was not going to surprise me.

The silence I left him he filled with his dinner party.

And that, more than the walking out, more than any single moment of that whole ordeal, was the thing that finally closed the door in me completely, quietly, for good.

A man can panic and flee in a crisis and later be horrified at himself; people are weak, and I could have worked with genuine remorse.

But a full day later, calm and rested, his first and only concern still his own career, no remorse anywhere in him, only irritation that his household had been disrupted, that was not weakness.