Dean scrubbed a hand over his face, water mixing with salt.
He had taken something beautiful and made it content. He had treated his marriage like an anecdote. Like branding. Like a thing to be mined.
He had documented her curiosity. Her sweetness. Her idealism. The very things that made herFiona.
He had turned her into a caricature to get laughs from people who didn’t even deserve to know her name.
He had built an entire persona—clever, detached, self-aware—on the bones of the woman who trusted him most.
And God help him, he’d been proud of it. He’d thought he was smart. Thought he was building a reputation. Thought people admired him for how “clever” he was, sharing “his wife’s quirks.”
They weren’t quirks. They were her.
And she had given them tohim.
Not to the internet. Not to his friends. Not to his agency.
Tohim.
Dean let his forehead fall to the steps. Cold stone. Hard edge. Shame and grief curdled together in his gut like acid.
How many times had he quietly judged Fiona for being naive?
How many times had he seen her joy for fragility?
How many times had she made something better—his day, his world, his stupid cynical heart—and he’d just nodded and filed it away like raw material?
Fiona had deserved someone who guarded her joy like treasure. Who looked at her strawberry socks and dinosaur facts and schoolyard optimism and said,That is what makes you magic.
Dean sat back on his heels, chest hollowed out by shame.
The rain clungto the sidewalk like consequence. His breath fogged in the air. He walked, not toward home. Just… walked.
He passed a storefront and saw his reflection again. Did he look like someone whose wife had just left him? Or did he look like someone who had never deserved one in the first place?
Dean stopped, leaned his hands against the cool glass of a closed café. His forehead rested there too, damp and shame-heavy.
He hadn’t just posted a few funny stories. He hadn’t made “a dumb joke,” or “a harmless page.” He hadarchitectedan arena for humiliation. Framed her softness as spectacle, her trust as punchline. He’d turned intimacy into currency.
He knew how she curled her toes when she got excited. He knew how she hesitated before answering a question because she always assumed the other person might be smarter. He knew how long it had taken her to feel like she could belong in his world—and how quickly he’d weaponized that vulnerability when he realized it made other people laugh.
He’d watched those comments roll in and he hadn’t shut it down.
He had let the world laugh at her because it madehimfeel clever. Sharp. Superior.
And now?
Now he saw it.
He saw her—really saw her—the way he should have all along. Not as some whimsical footnote to his ambitious life, but as the only person in the room who had ever been real. Earnest in a world that treated sincerity like a weakness.
He'd been so sure she’d forgive him. That she’d understand. That her goodness would stretch far enough to cover eventhis.
But now, standing there on a wet sidewalk with rain soaking through his shoes, Dean finally understood:
Fionashouldn’tforgive him.
He’d betrayed the one person who had seen magic in him before he’d earned it.
