The night Scott told me I wasn’t his wife, I finally believed him.
Not because he was right to say it. But because after nine years of rent, groceries, bills, late-night pep talks, and pretending his dreams were somehow ours too, I realized I’d been auditioning for a role he was never actually planning to give me.
The next evening, he came home smiling. He still expected dinner. He expected praise. He expected me to be exactly where he’d left me, doing exactly what I always did.
Instead, he froze in the doorway, staring at an apartment I’d already stopped pretending was ours.
I met Scott when I was twenty-three, in the back corner of a crowded bar downtown. He was on stage with a borrowed guitar, singing like there were a thousand people watching instead of twenty-seven tired regulars nursing their drinks. I remember thinking, right then, that I’d never seen anyone believe in himself that hard in my entire life.
Scott was talented. I want to be honest about that, because it matters to the story. He could walk into a plain, boring room and somehow make it feel softer just by picking up his guitar. People stopped talking when he sang. I stopped talking too, that first night, and I never really started again — not in the way that mattered, not in the way where I said what I actually needed.
Talent didn’t pay rent, though. So slowly, quietly, without either of us ever officially deciding it, I did.
At first we split things fairly. Fifty-fifty, like reasonable adults building a life together. Then he had a slow month. Then a gig fell through at the last minute. Then he needed new strings, studio time, a working phone so venues could actually reach him.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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