Page 101 of The Humiliated Wife

She just wished it had been her choice to share it.

CHAPTER 42

Dean

Dean brought the daisies.

June opened the door with a smile so warm it made Dean want to cry. She wore a flour-dusted apron and smelled like roasted garlic and home.

“You must be Dean.” She plucked the flowers from his hand and held them to her nose. “Daisies. Smart man. Come in.”

The house was small, cozy. Real. Framed family photos, crocheted blankets, a wobbly ceiling fan. The kind of place that had known laughter and life in equal measure. The kind of place Dean had thought he was building with Fiona.

Dean closed his eyes, and for just a moment he let himself imagine it—Fiona coming home to him, her laugh filling their apartment again, her body warm against his in the dark. The wanting was so sharp it felt like drowning.

Dean watched Russell and June move around each other in the kitchen like a choreographed dance. Russell rinsing dishes, June stirring something on the stove, their bodies automaticallyadjusting to make space, hands brushing as they passed. Decades of marriage written in movement.

This was what he could have had with Fiona. This easy intimacy, this unthinking partnership. Growing old together, wearing matching grooves into a life they'd built with their own hands.

His chest ached with the loss of it.

Russell emerged from the kitchen carrying a casserole dish. “Hope you’re hungry.”

Dean, starved in more ways than one, nodded. “I could eat.”

Dinner was lasagna and wine and a basket of garlic bread that June kept refilling every time Dean looked away. The conversation was light at first—Russell grumbling about the new guy in accounting, June telling a story about a neighbor’s dog that kept digging up her flower beds. Dean laughed, honestly, for the first time in what felt like weeks.

But the ease only held so long.

“So,” June said, pouring more wine into Dean’s glass with casual precision. “Your girl. What’s the plan?”

Russell groaned. “June.”

“What? He’s clearly still in love with her. You can see it all over his face.”

Dean stared into his lasagna. “There’s… no plan. I don’t think therecanbe a plan.”

“Nonsense.” June waved that away with her wineglass. “You’re young, and you’re sorry. That’s a start.”

Dean's breath caught. The possibility hung in the air, dangerous and intoxicating. What if hecouldhave her back? What if those arms that had held him on Emma's porch could be his again? The thought made him dizzy with want.

Russell set down his fork. “He didn’t forget an anniversary, June. He humiliated her. Publicly. Foryears.”

Dean swallowed. “He’s right. What I did… it wasn’t just a mistake. It was?—”

“Cruel,” Russell finished for him.

Dean flinched, even now. “Yes.”

June studied him. “And do you regret it?”

Dean looked up. His voice was quiet, but sure. “Every day.”

“Would you do it again?”

“Never. I’d burn down the whole internet before I made her feel that way again.”

June nodded thoughtfully. “What's she like, this Fiona of yours?”