Page 3 of June

I went to his office.

I told myself it was just a sweet surprise. I needed to see him. Maybe kiss him behind his desk like I used to when we were still dreaming about our future instead of doubting it.

Beatrice, his coworker, greeted me at the front. She smiled, warm as always.

"June! You look so good. Wedding countdown, huh?"

I smiled too, though it felt brittle.

"Yeah. Almost there."

Then she added, with a tilt of her head.

"I didn't know Aaron came in late today. Everything okay?"

I froze.

"Oh... yeah,"

I lied.

"He just had something this morning. All good."

She nodded and led me back, knocking once before opening the door.

"Your fiancée's here,"

she chirped before stepping away.

Aaron looked up, startled. Not the happy, flirty surprise I'd hoped for.

His expression shifted too quickly—surprised, then irritated, then masked behind that polite smile I'd started to loathe.

"What are you doing here?"

he asked, not unkind but not exactly thrilled either.

"I brought you coffee,"

I said, holding it out like some desperate offering.

"Thought I'd surprise you."

He glanced at the cup and said flatly.

"I already had one."

Then turned back to his computer.

I stood there, awkward and invisible.

After a long beat, he sighed.

"Sorry, June. I'm just swamped today."

He didn't even reach for my hand.

I got the message.

I smiled again, brittle as glass, and walked out like everything was fine.

I went straight to the studio.

I choreographed something angry. Wild. Confused. The kind of movement that doesn't look pretty but feels like screaming. Every count felt like a question I didn't want to ask. Every turn, every stomp, was a sentence left unsaid.

Leo watched from the side, arms crossed. When the music stopped, he didn't clap. He just looked at me.

"You good?"

he asked quietly.

"Yeah,"

I said, waving it off.

"Just blowing off steam."

He didn't believe me. But he let it go.

That became the routine.

Teach kids to dance—smile, giggle, twirl. Pretend.

Go home.

Kiss a stranger who smiled and laughed but never really looked at me anymore.

Two weeks of pretending.

Then I broke.

One night, I stood in the kitchen and just said it, voice trembling:

"I need an answer, Aaron. Something's wrong, and I can't breathe like this anymore."

He looked at me for a long time. Then nodded.

"I'll talk to you tonight."

The rest of the day was agony. I taught with shaking hands, laughed too loud, made excuses for the tears in my eyes. I couldn't eat. Could barely breathe.

Then night came, and so did he. His face was pale when he walked through the door. His shoulders slumped like the weight of something awful was pressing down on him.

"I think we need to postpone the wedding."

I didn't react. Not at first. I couldn't. The words didn't feel real. Like I'd heard them through water, or glass.

Then, slowly, I whispered:

"Is it Selene?"

He shut his eyes.

"Nothing happened. I swear to you, nothing happened. But... yeah. It's her."

I waited.

"I didn't expect it. I thought it was in the past. But when I saw her, it all came back so fast. And now I'm caught in this place where I don't know what's real. I want to do the right thing—I'm your fiancé. I love you. I owe it to you, to us, to figure this out. But I can't marry you when someone else is in my head."

I stared at him like he was a stranger.

Like the man I was going to marry had died, and this ghost was trying to justify the killing, and that's exactly what it felt like. A death.

Not mine. His.

The man I loved—the man who once courted me with handwritten notes tucked into my coat pockets, who waited outside my dance classes with takeout and flower.

"just because"—he was gone. The man who would text me midday just to say he missed me, who made me playlists for every season, who spent a whole weekend repainting the living room because I once said I missed the color of sunflowers.

He decorated our home like it was a temple to joy—to me. Little gold suns in every room. A bright yellow kettle. A framed photo of us at the lake, captioned in his handwriting: My sunshine.

He even tattooed a small sun on his wrist. He told me.

"You're the only constant in my sky."

I cried the day he did it. He kissed my tears and said.

"You light up everything."

This was the man who planned his proposal with every detail mapped out—who called my oddball best friends months in advance to make sure they could fly in. Who built me a dance studio with his own hands. Who invested in it because he believed in me even before I did.

He used to light up every time he saw me. Even if it had been an hour. His face would soften, and he'd open his arms like the world made sense again because I was in it.

Where did he go?

How did he forget me so easily?

How did I go from being his sun to being a shadow?

Now he won't even touch me. He doesn't look at me like I'm the light anymore—he looks at me like I'm in the way.

How does love just... stop?

It didn't make sense. It still doesn't. So I knew I was going to mourn. Not the relationship. Not the wedding. I will mourn him—the version of Aaron who made me feel like the most beloved person on this earth. The one who promised forever with stars in his eyes. Because whoever this is, this quiet, evasive man full of guilt and hesitation and excuses—he's not the one who asked me to be his wife.

That man is gone and the grief of it... I don't think I've ever known pain like this, and just like that, I turned and walked out of the apartment we built together.