You Were Just Passing Through My Life

Twenty years together.

It was the first time I had ever picked up Finn Simmons's phone.

A contact saved as 'Little Crybaby' had just sent a selfie, a face cried red and blotchy.

"Finn, do I look pretty when I cry?"

The cold went through me, head to foot.

The next second, he came out of the bedroom.

He saw the phone in my hand and put out his hand, flat and unbothered. "Give it back."

My knuckles went white. "You're not going to explain?"

His face didn't change.

"Nothing to explain. It's exactly what you think. I cheated."

My voice shook. "Why?"

He lit a cigarette, looked at me, and smiled.

"Because she cries better than you. Does that count?"

...

The air went still in an instant.

I watched the smoke rise from between his fingers, drawing a thin gray line in the space between us.

His eyes crossed it and settled on my face.

"See?"

He spoke, and there was a kind of expected mockery in it. "You go quiet again. You don't say anything. You didn't even tear up."

He turned and walked toward the balcony, done with the bother of dealing with me.

"Finn."

I called him.

He stopped, but he didn't turn around.

There was so much I had meant to ask him.

When it started. Whether he thought he'd done right by me, doing this.

What he meant by that line, "she cries better than you."

Ten years dating, ten years married, twenty years in all.

I was thirty-six now.

My whole life tied to him.

When was the last time I had cried in front of him?

I couldn't remember.

But I remembered the year he got hurt.

Twenty-two, not long after he started the company, a fight with someone, badly hurt.

I cried in the hospital corridor until I couldn't breathe.

He lay on the bed, blood still on his face, and reached up to wipe my tears, his voice so hoarse I could barely hear it.

"Baby, don't cry. Crying is the most useless thing."

"Don't worry. I'm really fine."

After that, I never cried again.

No matter what happened.

When his company failed, I stayed up through countless nights with him. I didn't cry.

When his mother died, I held him up at the funeral. I didn't cry.

When our child was beaten until I lost the pregnancy, I didn't dare tell him, and I didn't cry.

Later, when he stayed out all night and said it was company business, I waited in the living room until dawn. I didn't cry then either.

The man who taught me that crying was useless.

And now he was telling me he'd cheated because she cried better than I did.

I swallowed those questions back down one by one, like swallowing nails, my throat full of the taste of rust.

In the end, all I asked was this:

"Are you drawing up the divorce papers, or am I?"

He didn't move.

A few seconds passed, then he turned his head to look at me.

"Stephanie Hughes."

He used my full name, a laugh under his voice. "How old are you now?"

I didn't answer.

He set the cigarette back between his lips and turned to face me.

Leaning against the balcony doorframe, lazy and loose.

"Thirty-six, isn't it."

"A woman's golden years are only a handful, and yours are long gone. On top of that, no job, no income, your figure's gone, and you're nothing much to look at."

"What have you got left now? Oh, right—"

He paused, like he'd just remembered something amusing. "Ten years married to me, never once any birth control, and you never got pregnant once. You can't even have a child."

"Who do you think would want you, once you've left me?"

I froze where I stood.

I couldn't believe those words had actually come out of his mouth.

I'd known him for twenty years.

I'd seen him at eighteen, the way he came swaggering toward me across the field after scoring a goal.