Have You Ever

  The house has never been so quiet. The kettle hums in the background, and I half expect your hand to touch the small of my back as you sneak a biscuit from the tin. But you're not here anymore. You were my beginning, you know. High school sweethearts—what a phrase, so quaint, so true. I still remember that shy smile when you stood at our front door, hair combed, nerves visible beneath your pressed suit. Navy blue, if I recall correctly, with your grandfather’s cufflinks. I wore the pale pink dress I’d spent weeks sewing, with lace at the collar and a little ribbon around my waist. My father glowered behind me, arms crossed, giving you that stare— “Ten o'clock, son. Not a minute later, or else.” You swallowed hard and said, “Yes, sir,” then offered your arm like I was royalty. You always treated me that way. We built a life from next to nothing, but what we had overflowed with love. I remember the birth of our middle child—my body trembling, complications pressing down on...

  It started as a quiet ache, an unease lurking just beneath the surface, easily ignored in the moments when life felt familiar and stable. But guilt has a way of creeping in—slowly at first, then all at once, until it colours every thought, every memory, every decision that led to this point. The weight of his choices sat heavy on his chest. What had once been impulsive, fuelled by fleeting emotions and fractured logic, had now become an undeniable reckoning. It was never meant to spiral into something this profound, this consuming—but the past has a way of lingering far beyond its expiration date. Facing his wife was the hardest part. The betrayal was done, the truth laid bare, but consequences move differently than regrets. They don’t dissolve with apologies or grand gestures. They sit in the quiet spaces between conversations, in the looks exchanged but never spoken aloud. He had hurt her. That much was undeniable. No matter how he framed it—whether it was loneliness, confus...

 For months, maybe even years, I had felt it—a quiet frustration buried beneath routine, an unspoken disconnect I didn’t know how to confront. My relationship had stretched across nearly four years, built on familiarity, history, and firsts. He was the first man I had ever been with, and that bond had kept me tethered, even when I no longer felt fulfilled. But something was missing. I couldn’t name it, couldn’t define it, but I felt it in the quiet moments, in the lack of excitement, in the way my own desires seemed muted. And then, there he was—someone older, someone confident, someone who saw me in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t calculated. It was impulsive, a moment of clarity disguised as recklessness. One minute we were watching TV, the next, I was on his lap, shedding hesitation along with my top while he was still on the phone. We spent a few nights together—two, maybe three. Enough to make me realize what I had been missing. Not just in phy...