“There’s one way out,” he says.
You already know the line. You heard him rehearse it in his office while his mistress laughed. Still, hearing it again in your kitchen, with your son humming on the floor and the smell of rice on the stove, makes something inside your ribs turn hard as iron.
“If we divorce now,” he says, “they can’t touch you. They can’t touch Eli. I’d be doing it to protect you.”
He reaches for your hand then, and for a second you almost admire the craftsmanship of the performance. He has cheated on you, insulted you, plotted to strip you of everything, and still he has the nerve to dress betrayal in the language of sacrifice. You let him take your hand, because sometimes survival requires stillness that looks like trust.
“What would happen to us?” you ask softly.
He leans forward, sensing weakness where there is only calculation. “It’d be temporary. Just on paper. Once I fix everything, we can figure things out. But right now, if you love me, you need to sign.”
If you love me.
That sentence used to work on you the way prayer works on desperate people. It used to quiet your doubts, bend your pride, make you call cruelty stress and neglect a phase. But now the words sound cheap, like fake gold under bad jewelry store lights.
