The End of Our Marriage
When I got home that night, Mark was sitting at the kitchen table.
He looked older. Smaller.
“I can’t carry on with this silence between us,” he whispered. “I never stopped loving Ava.”
I looked at him for a long moment before answering honestly.
“I think you loved being seen as a good father more than you loved paying attention.”
He broke down completely after that.
I felt strangely calm.
For days I had believed there was some impossible mystery surrounding Ava’s death. In reality, it came down to something painfully ordinary.
Lies.
I didn’t need to say it out loud. Mark already knew it was over.
There was no way I could heal from a betrayal like this.
Part of me wondered how he and Lauren would live with what they had done — the affair, and their role in what happened to my daughter.
But they didn’t matter anymore.
What mattered now was that I needed to put myself first.
