Page 56 of The Humiliated Wife

Weak and pathetic and utterly, irredeemably small.

The realization wasn’t intellectual—it wascellular. Full-body. Like every nerve ending had suddenly come online just to hum with shame. He braced his palms harder against the counter, trying not to shake.

He was a fool. A moron. A man so numb to goodness he’d mistaken sincerity for weakness. He’d taken the softest thing he’d ever felt—his love for her—and twisted it into something sharp so people wouldn’t see his vulnerability.

And he hadn’t thought about the consequences.

A parasite. That’s what he was.

And somehow, impossibly, she had loved him. Loved him despite the cracks. Despite the rot. She’d offered him everything.

Until she saw the truth. Until she sawhim.

The version without the polish. The one beneath the curated charm and career success.

A man who laughed behind his wife’s back and called it affection.

He let out a breath that rattled in his chest.

Fiona had survived the thing he did to her—and turned it intolight. She’d taken the broken pieces and repurposed them into something with purpose.

He knew he had to read through the posts he had made. He had to see what he'd actually done to her, not the sanitized version he'd been telling himself. Not the "harmless jokes" or "affectionate teasing" his mind had rewritten it as.

He had to read @shitfionasays the way Fiona had read it. The way twenty-three thousand strangers had read it.

Dean slid down onto the kitchen floor, back against the cabinets, knees pulled to his chest like a child.

He just wasn’t sure how he would be able to live with the knowledge once he did.

Dean shouldn’t be here.

The sensible part of his brain—what was left of it—told him that as he sat in his car across the street from the elementary school, parked like a creeper with coffee he wasn’t drinking and a heart that wouldn’t stop pounding.

He wasn’t stalking her.

He wasn’t.

He just… wanted to see her. From a distance. One real moment, unfiltered. Just her.

He was pathetic. A grown man reduced to lurking outside his estranged wife's workplace.

The pickup line was still. Afternoon sun hit the building at a slant, glinting off windows and casting long shadows across the sidewalk. And then—because the universe didn’t know how much he didn’t deserve it—she stepped out the front doors.

Fiona.

In a long cardigan that fluttered around her knees, hair half-up, glasses perched low on her nose as she spoke to a studentwalking beside her. She bent down, smiled, tied a shoelace. Stood back up and ruffled the kid’s hair gently before sending him off with a paper in his hand and confidence in his step.

God, she was beautiful.

More than beautiful. She was spectacular in the way that mattered—in her gentleness, her purpose, the way she made that anxious kid feel safe just by paying attention.

Dean blinked hard.

He used to be part of this. Part ofher. He used to be the one who got to hold that hand, make that coffee, hear about that shoelace over dinner.

And now?

He was just a man in a car, watching the love of his life walk through the world without him.