His Automated Reply Cost Him His Wife Chapter 19

His Automated Reply Cost Him His Wife Chapter 19

After Ethan was discharged, he returned to California.

His sentence for violating the no-contact order was community service. His sister handled everything, then forced him onto a flight back to San Francisco. She couldn’t stand him wandering the city where I lived like a ghost any longer.

He didn’t return to our old house in Marin County. He had already sold it and established a trust fund in the name of our unborn child. Instead, he rented a dark apartment in Berkeley and locked himself inside.

For three full months.

The curtains were never opened. Piles of takeout boxes rotted by the door. The only thing that grew was the number of empty Jack Daniel’s bottles. Whenever he was awake, he poured alcohol down his throat until his body gave out and he collapsed onto the floor. Alcohol was a switch that could temporarily silence the screaming alarm in his head.

He had thought that a ruined hand and the end of his career were the worst possible punishments.

He was wrong. The real torture was that I wouldn’t even appear in his dreams.

He began to desperately try to recall my face, only to find, in terror, that the details he thought were engraved in his bones were fading. The faint scar on my left brow, the deeper dimple at the right corner of my mouth when I smiled, the way I bit my lip when I was thinking… it was all growing blurred.

He couldn’t remember the exact placement of the freckles on my nose.

I was being erased from his memory, inch by inch.

That fear was a thousand times more terrifying than the moment the garbage compactor had mangled his hand. He broke down completely.

He dragged the suitcase I’d abandoned from the back of the closet. Inside were a few old clothes I hadn’t had time to take. Like a drowning man, he buried his face in them, frantically trying to inhale the faint, lingering scent of my perfume.

The apartment filled with a pungent mixture of decay and alcohol.

Late one night, Ethan crawled out from among the bottles, his stomach convulsing. He rushed to the bathroom and leaned over the toilet, dry-heaving.

First came stomach acid that burned his throat. Then yellow-green bile. Finally, a warm, sweet metallic taste surged up his throat.

He coughed up a dark red clot of blood.

Then a second mouthful, a third. Blood sprayed across the cold white tiles, like roses blooming and withering in an instant.

He didn’t have the strength to get up. He slid to the floor like a puddle of mud.

The cold tile pressed against his burning cheek. In a daze, he thought it might be better to just die like this. Once he was dead, he would no longer be tormented by the regret that felt like being flayed alive.

He stared at the mold spots on the ceiling, blood clinging to the corner of his mouth as his cracked lips moved.

“Nora…”

“I was wrong… I really was wrong…”

“I miss you…”

With the last of his strength, he whispered my name again and again, as if it were his only prayer before sinking into darkness.

He kept whispering until his throat was too raw to make a sound, and his vision went completely black.