The night Scott told me I wasn’t his wife, I finally believed him.
Not because he was right to say it out loud the way he did, careless and half laughing, like the words cost him nothing. But because after nine years of rent, groceries, late electric bills, and midnight pep talks about a career that never quite arrived, I understood, all at once and with a clarity that felt almost physical, that I had spent nearly a decade auditioning for a role he had never actually intended to give me.
The next evening, he came home smiling, guitar case swinging lightly against his leg, still expecting the dinner I had planned to celebrate his one paid gig, still expecting praise, still expecting me. Instead he froze in the doorway of an apartment I had, sometime in the last twenty four hours, quietly stopped pretending was ours.
I met Scott when I was twenty three, in the back corner of a crowded bar downtown, the kind of place with sticky floors and a stage barely large enough for one person and a borrowed amplifier. He was up there with a guitar that wasn’t his, singing like there were a thousand people in the room instead of twenty seven tired regulars nursing their second drinks. I remember thinking, watching him from my stool near the bar, that talent like his deserved a bigger room someday. I didn’t yet understand that deserving and receiving are two entirely different economies, and that I would spend the better part of my twenties quietly subsidizing the gap between them.
Scott really was talented, I want to be fair about that, even now. He could take a plain, unremarkable room and make it feel softer just by picking up a guitar in the corner of it. But talent, it turns out, does not pay rent, and somewhere along the way, without either of us officially agreeing to it, I did.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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