Roxanne opened her mouth to say something, but Dean didn’t wait.
"You want to know the truth?" His voice got louder, drawing stares from other tables. "I do think baked goods maybe could solve everything. I like stupid pop music and cheesy movies and cloud formations."
His laugh was bitter, broken. "I spent my whole life pretending to be too cool for the things that actually made me happy because I was terrified that people like you would think I was a dork. But you know what? She was right about everything. About kindness mattering. About small gestures changing people's days. About the world being beautiful if you just pay attention."
He gestured wildly at their stunned faces. “I don’t want to be sophisticated. I don’t want to be detached. All it did was make me too much of a idiot to see that my wife was the smartest person in every room we walked into."
“I chose this,” he said. “Over her. It was the stupidest thing I could have ever done.”
He tossed a few bills on the table and turned to go.
He couldn’t have Fiona back.
But he could still become someone she might have been proud of.
Even if she never saw it.
Dean satat the kitchen table, the yellow pad in front of him. The apartment was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of traffic below.
He wasn't itchy under his skin anymore.
He was just... lost. And clear, in a way he hadn't been in years.
The legal pad was already scarred with his previous attempts. At the top of the first page, thick black lines crossed out "CONTROL THE NARRATIVE" so violently the paper had torn. Below that, "Get Fiona Back" was underlined. The list underneath was a joke.
Those titles felt like they belonged to someone else now. Someone who thought love was a campaign to be managed, a problem to be solved with the right strategy and execution.
Dean flipped to a clean page.
But then he stopped. Pen hovering over the blank lines.
How do you make amends for humiliation? For betrayal? For turning someone's trust into entertainment?
He couldn't apologize his way out of this. Couldn't buy his way back into her good graces. She'd made that clear.
But maybe... maybe he could help the things she cared about.
Dean started writing:
Things Fiona Cares About:
Her classroom
Her sister Emma
Her cousin Marcy
He paused, thinking harder. What else? What mattered to her beyond the obvious?
Her dignity. Her pride.
She cared about not being seen as naive. Not being laughed at. Not being the butt of jokes she wasn't in on.
And he had systematically stripped that away from her. Post by post. Caption by caption. Like by like.
Shame burned hot in his chest—genuine, awful recognition of what he'd done to another person. To the person he claimed to love most.
He added to the list:Her dignity
