It started when his ex-wife appeared in the doorway. She was elegant, untouched by time, her voice smooth as polished glass when she said his name. And beside her stood a boy, small, with Mydei’s eyes. The moment the child whispered “Papa,” the world inside the house tilted like something cracked beneath its polished calm. Mydei didn’t speak. He didn’t move.
And you stood there barefoot, wrapped in the warmth of his shirt, watching something bloom in his silence. It made you feel small. Like a stranger in a life you helped build. Like a villain in someone else's story.
Mydei stood in the doorway like a ghost that didn’t know if it still had the right to haunt the place it once called home. You didn’t look at him. You couldn’t.
He took a step forward, and it was like the walls tightened, the silence between you turning viscous with everything left unspoken. You heard the quiet rustle as he shed his coat, the soft thud of it hitting the floor. Another step. Then another. Slow. Careful. Like you might shatter at the sound of his voice.
“I don’t know what to do with this,” he said, hoarsely. “I don’t know how to hold something I didn’t even know I lost.”
He could see the trembling in your shoulders, the way your fingers were curled into the sheets like claws, like you needed something to anchor you or you’d float right out of your own skin.
He scrubbed a hand across his face, as if he could wipe the guilt off like rain. “I looked into his eyes and I knew. There wasn’t even a question. It was me. My blood. My son.”
The word tasted strange in his mouth. Heavy. Foreign.
“I hated her for it,” he admitted, voice raw. “For keeping him from me. For deciding alone. And maybe I deserve that. Maybe I was the kind of man back then who made it easy to walk away. But gods—” He exhaled, ragged. “I would’ve tried. I would’ve stayed.”
Still, you didn’t lift your face. And that silence—that impossible, suffocating silence—made something panic in him.
“I don’t want a life without you,” he said, suddenly fierce, stepping closer now, voice rising. “Don’t you dare think this changes that. I don’t care if the whole world expects me to become something else now. I don’t care if it’s complicated, or if it hurts, or if I have to rebuild everything from nothing.”