Dorian had a hundred reasons, each one reasonable on its own.
The merger.
The travel.
The stress. I’m just tired, Odette. He said it so often it stopped being a sentence and became a kind of wall, a thing he set between them whenever she came too close.
She had spent months on her side of that wall, first hurt, then confused, then — this was the part she was least proud of — apologizing.
Wondering what she had done.
Trying harder.
Cooking the dinners he didn’t come home for, buying the lingerie he didn’t notice, lying awake beside a man who slept turned away from her as though she gave off cold.
That was the quiet violence of it.
He never raised his voice, never struck her, never did a single thing she could point to and name.