Reborn to ruin him

I want to tell you something nobody tells you about loving the wrong person.

It doesn't feel wrong.

That's the part that breaks you --- not the betrayal at the end, not the moment everything collapses--but the years in the middle where you argued with everyoe that this must be right.  Where you are so certain you have found something real that you pour yourself into it without measuring what you're losing.

I lost everything.

And I did it with a smile on my face.

His name was Callum Weston.

I met him when I was twenty-four years old and foolish in the way that only people who have never been truly hurt can be foolish--openly, completely, without armor. He was beautiful in that effortless way that makes you feel chosen just because his eyes landed on you. Sandy hair. Easy smile. The kind of man who makes a room feel warmer simply by existing in it.

I didn't know then that some people run cold underneath.

I found out the hard way.

We married two years after we met. I was twenty-six, holding white flowers and crying the way you cry when you believe something completely. My mother squeezed my hand at the altar. My father looked proud, even Elise, my best friend, leaned over and whispered that I looked beautiful.

I was so happy I was luminous with it but that was the last time I remember feeling that light.

I burned my fingers on a Wednesday.

I remember because Wednesdays were the days Callum stayed late at the office, which meant dinner had to be ready by eight, the apartment had to be presentable, and I had to be composed. Those were not rules he wrote down anywhere. 

I had learned them the way you learn things in a marriage that takes more than it gives, quietly, through repetition, through the specific education of understanding what his silences meant and what his tone meant and what the particular set of his jaw when he came through the door meant.

I had become fluent in him.

I wish I hadn't.

Because it’d cost me my life. 

Literally.

I was at the stove with Lily on my hip when it happened. She was fourteen months old and going through a phase where being put down was the greatest injustice she had ever experienced, so I had been cooking one handed for forty minutes. Stirring with my right, holding her with my left, my lower back aching in that specific way it ached every Wednesday, Thursday and most Fridays.

The pan handle caught my palm when I reached across the flame.

The pain was white hot and immediate.

I pressed my lips together, shifted Lily to my other hip and ran my hand briefly under the cold tap, wrapped a dish cloth around it, and went back to the stove without making a sound.

Later that night Callum ate his dinner and said it was slightly oversalted. I said I would be more careful next time.

He said thanks, kissed my forehead, and went to take a shower. I sat at the kitchen table after he left and looked at the dish cloth around my hand and I thought, when did I stop flinching? 

Not just at the burns. At all of it?. 

Callum was ambitious. Brilliantly, ruthlessly ambitious. And I--I believed in him the way you believe in someone you have chosen with your whole chest. So when he needed me to be less, I became less. When his career demanded my silence, I gave it. When his image required a certain kind of wife, I folded myself into that shape and told myself it was love.

---

My mother used to call every Sunday.

Her name would light up my screen at ten in the morning and I would answer and we would talk for an hour about nothing, about the garden and the neighbours and whatever film she had watched that week that she could not stop thinking about.

Those calls were the most ordinary thing in my life.

I did not know then that ordinary was the most valuable thing you could have.

"You look tired," she said every Sunday for the first two years of my marriage. Just honestly, the way she said most things, like the truth was a courtesy she owed me.

"I'm fine, Mum." I would argue right back every time.

"You said that last week."

"Because I was fine last week too."

"Sera." She had a way of saying my name that contained an entire conversation. "Are you eating properly?"

"Yes."

"Sleeping?"

"Mum—"

"I am asking because I am your mother and that is my job, you don't get to Mum me out of my job—"

I’d huff in annoyance, "I am sleeping fine."

"How's Callum?"

"He's good. Busy. The Henderson project is keeping him late most nights."

"Mm." The sound she made when she was deciding how much to say. 

"And you? What's keeping you busy?"

His dinners, his parents, his presentations, his image, his career, his comfort, his life.

"This and that," I’ll reply and she would sigh.

Eight months later, I stopped answering on Sundays altogether and she called anyway, every single week without fail, her name lighting up my screen in a house that had slowly stopped feeling like mine, and I let it ring because Callum said I was too dependent on my childhood.

Thirty-two missed calls.

I counted them later, sitting on a bathroom floor at two in the morning, doing the kind of arithmetic that does not tell you how many calls you missed but how many Sundays you chose someone else's comfort over your own mother's voice.

Thirty-two Sundays.

Thirty-two times her name lit up and I watched it ring and I let it go.

He told me to move across the city to take care of his parents the same year.

He said, “Just in the way that counted”. 

His mother needed consistency. His father's knee was not improving. Callum could not be in two places at once and I had to be his perfect wife.

So I cooked their meals.

Managed his father's medications, seven different bottles lined up on the kitchen counter that had to be taken in a specific order at specific times, which I memorized when no one asked me to and I did it anyway because that was what I was. 

A good wife.

I sat in hospital waiting rooms during three separate surgeries, saying a little prayer for her.

His mother never learned my name.

She asked for Callum every time she came out of surgery. Every single time.

I was there for all three of her surgeries.

I had several thoughts about calling my own mother.

My hand moved toward my phone.

Then I remembered what Callum had said about emotional dependency and investing in the marriage and the kind of wife he needed me to be, so, I put both hands back on the wheel and drove home in the dark and lied myself I was fine.

I was very convincing. 

I didn’t know I would participate in my own death.