Page 48 of The Humiliated Wife

Fiona stoodat the front of the classroom, red pen in hand, while her students filed in slowly. Mornings were always sluggish, but this one felt heavier.

Or maybe that was just her.

She capped the pen and set it down beside a stack of ungraded quizzes. “Warm-up is on the board,” she said gently. “Five minutes. No talking.”

A few groans. One exaggerated yawn. The soft rustle of notebooks opening.

She moved between rows, pausing to hand out worksheets, murmur praise, answer a question with a nod. It felt good to move. To be needed in a way that wassimple. Direct.

There was comfort in the rhythm of it. The creak of chairs, the soft scratch of pencils. Her world reduced to fractions andequations and a kid named Lucas who couldn’t stop drawing dragons in the margins of his math.

No one here cared what car she drove. No one here knew what she’d left behind on a rainy Sunday night.

And yet, it followed her.

Not like a storm. More like the space after one—the silence after thunder, where everything feels sharper. More fragile.

Her eyes flicked to her desk. The lanyard with her new car key hung from the edge of a drawer, the electric fob catching a glint of sunlight. Sleek. Modern. A little absurd against the clutter of stickers and sticky notes, the half-dried whiteboard markers she’d been rationing for weeks.

Every second of the commute had felt like wearing someone else’s skin. The steering wheel too smooth, the console too quiet, the leather too polished. Even her reflection in the rearview mirror had looked unfamiliar.

But she got to school on time. No disasters. No flat tires. No breakdowns on the side of the road.

Just her. In a car she didn’t ask for. Moving forward anyway.

“Miss Fiona?”

Lucas held up his worksheet. “Is number four supposed to be negative?”

Fiona blinked. Came back to the room. Took the paper from his hand.

“Yes,” she said gently, circling the mistake with her red pen. “Because when you subtract a larger number from a smaller one?—”

“You go backwards,” he finished for her, grinning. “Got it.”

She smiled, and this one felt real.

The bell rang twenty minutes later, and chairs scraped, backpacks zipped, voices rose like birds startled into flight.

Fiona moved to her desk and sank into her chair, just for a moment. Her fingers brushed the key fob.

It still didn’t feel like a gift.

It felt like a debt being paid too late.

CHAPTER 22

Dean

Dean lethimself into the apartment, fumbling with the lock. The silence hit him—not just quiet, butempty. Fiona-less.

He should have just stayed at work. Instead of coming home to this. Without Fiona here, itwasn’this home.

The living room looked exactly the same, but felt different. Like living in a stage set after the actors had gone home.

Dean poured himself a drink he didn't want and sank onto the couch. His phone sat on the coffee table, notifications piling up. Probably comments on the account. People asking where the new content was.

Fuck the account.