He never cared much for dinners like this—fancy places, candlelight flickering between them, the quiet hum of distant conversations. But tonight, he had to make an effort. After months of cold silence, of keeping his distance, the guilt was finally catching up to him.

Veronica sat across from him, hid wife. A wife not by choice, not by love—just a forced bond neither of them asked for. She barely spoke, barely looked at him. He knew why. He had given her nothing to hold on to.

He took a sip of his red wine, the words he wanted to say stuck somewhere between his pride and regret. Despite being someone so cold.

Then, a shadow approached their table. A woman. Beautiful, confident. She stood beside his wife, twirling a strand of hair between her fingers, her eyes bright with expectation.

"Can I get his number?"

She wasn’t talking to him. She was asking her— Veronica. As if she weren’t his wife at all, as if she were just some stranger sitting across from him.