The Thousand-Day Streak of Lies

Cher

. White walls, a beeping monitor beside me, and a dull ache behind my eyes.

nd but distant. "Your husband left a few hours ago. Said he had an emergency." My husban

. I closed my eyes, a single tear escaping. I was done. Done with the lies, done with the pain, done with him.

ight reel. Griffith. My Griffith. The one who used to track my flights across the cou

e me from his New York office, "Counting down the minutes until I can hold you again." He always found me, no matter how remote my loca

, then sporadic. The video calls, once our lifeline, became brief and stra

Sometimes, he' d reply with a generic "You too." My fingers would hover over the keyboard, wanting to demand answers, wa

on't want you to see me like this." That was a new one. In ten years, he' d never cared about how he looked to me. I felt a familiar pang of sel

background. "Who was that?" I asked, a knot forming in my stomach. "Just Kallie," he' d sai

't seem to notice. Or if he did, he didn't care. The silence stretched betwee

me: "The subscriber you dialed is unavailable." My number was blocked. I stared at the screen, tears blurring my vision. My stomach clenched, and a

trange mix of annoyance and feigned concern. "Kallie must have been messing with my phone. You

trouble," it read. "Buy yourself something nice." My trouble? Was our decade together, my pain, so easily qua

nds of his job. It was him. His indifference. His lies. His complete disre

r in San Francisco, convinced myself that proximity would fix everything. I would move to New York, close the distanc

how to tell you this, but... Griffith and Kallie? They're everywhere. Dinners, lat

d envisioned, shattered into a million pieces. The truth, ugly and undeniable, finally stared me in the fac