I broke my wrist in a fall. I thought the hardest part would be asking for help. But it wasn’t the cast, or the pain, or even the recovery.
It was what my husband said when I finally told him how humiliated I felt. That sentence broke something in me, and I didn’t fix it.
You think breaking a bone will teach you how to ask for help. But sometimes, it teaches you who will never offer it.
Two months ago, I slipped on the back steps while carrying groceries and shattered my right wrist.
It wasn’t a hairline fracture or a sprain. It was full-cast, surgery-scheduled, can’t-button-my-jeans kind of broken.
My husband, Wells, made a show of “helping.”
By which I mean he sighed through every task like he was clocking in for community service.
When he washed the dishes, he made sure I heard the clatter. When he did laundry, he left my shirts in a pile and claimed that ironing them “hurt his shoulder.”
I thanked him anyway.
I felt pathetic enough already.
And he loved reminding me I couldn’t drive, couldn’t chop vegetables, and couldn’t even wash my own hair without feeling like I was going to collapse.
Then came the Friday that cracked something deeper than my wrist.
**
I had just come back from my follow-up appointment. The orthopedic surgeon rewrapped my wrist in a new cast and told me to keep resting it. I was exhausted from pretending I wasn’t in pain.
All I wanted was to sit down and breathe for a minute.
Instead, I opened the door and stopped cold.
The living room was packed.
At least eight men I barely knew, shoes on the rug, pizza boxes stacked like greasy paper towers across the coffee table. There were beer bottles tucked between couch cushions.
Someone had turned the game up so loud that the floor vibrated.
Wells popped his head out from the kitchen, beaming.
“Guys’ night!” he said. “Babe, can you grab the ranch?
And plates?”
I didn’t move. I looked down at the fresh cast on my wrist, then back up at him.
“It’s not like your arm’s falling off,” Wells said, chuckling.
A man in a hoodie, Devin, smirked and leaned over to someone else on the couch.
Wells didn’t correct him. He didn’t say a word in my defense.
He just laughed along.
I didn’t argue. I didn’t yell. I just walked into the kitchen and opened the cabinet with my good hand.
“Where’s the ranch?” I asked.
I hated ranch. I hated mustard. And I hated what was going on in my home.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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