The nights were always the hardest.

When the city outside quieted, when the curtains fell heavy against the windows, and when the apartment was nothing more than walls holding too much silence. That was when Sae’s voice would slip through the dark—soft, low, almost trembling in its effort to sound steady.

“I love you,” he’d whisper. As if saying it could amend the cracks neither of you could ignore.

At first, you clung to it. To the way those words sounded on his tongue—meant to be tender, meant to reassure, meant to soothe your heart. To the way his breath fanned against your hair when he leaned close enough to murmur them like a vow. It used to mean something once, used to set your chest alight with warmth and love. But now…now they felt heavy—pressing you down, instead of lifting you up.

Because you could hear it. The hollowness behind them. The faint, sharp edge of a lie that cut deeper the more he repeated it.

The lie between his teeth.

Sae knew too. He had to. That every “I love you” tasted like poison in his mouth, venom burning through his throat, and still…he gave it to you. As though if he fed you enough of it, something would eventually…shift. As though repeating it could summon back the version of him that once said it without hesitation, without that flicker of pain shadowing his eyes.

The fights didn’t help. They came often now, sparked by nothing— sparked by everything.

Little remarks that snowballed into raised voices, into hours of deathly silence. You’d both retreat into different corners of the apartment, pretending that space could soothe the ache. And when night fell, when the anger dulled but never fully diminished, he’d lean in, lips brushing your ear, and whisper the same three words like a prayer.

“I love you.”

A single prayed that should have healed. That should have been heard. That should have mattered.

But it never did.

Because each time he said it, your heart clenched harder; as if it knew what your mind didn’t want to accept—that love like this wasn’t alive anymore. It was being kept on life support, starved of oxygen, suffocating in its own silence.

And still, you stayed.

You stayed because some part of you wanted to believe him. Because hope was easier to cradle than the truth. Because leaving him felt like tearing out half of yourself, even if that half that remained was already bleeding, wounded by months of silent torture.

But hope runs thin. It frays at the edges, unravels one strand at a time until there is nothing left to hold onto.

You started to see it in the way your smiles no longer reached your eyes, in how your hands found fewer reasons to reach for him. You started to feel it in how the air between you lingered with words left unsaid, heavier each day.

Until one night, after another argument that ended the same way—with silence stretching across the bed—you couldn’t do it anymore. The silence had grown heavier than any raised word, pressing down on your chest until it felt impossible to breathe. And then, like clockwork, his voice came again—low and frayed, broken in its attempt to calm.

“I love you.”

It should have softened you. It always had before. But this time, the words cracked against you like glass, too fragile to hold weight anymore. You didn’t let it soothe you. You didn’t let yourself pretend. Because you knew it wasn’t love anymore—it was denial, it was fear…it was the ache of two souls clinging to a ghost that had already left them.

So you left. Whether with a suitcase by the door or a single sentence that split the night apart, you walked away from a lie. From him. From the hollow comfort of words that had once been a promise, but now were nothing more than echoes in an empty room, words that no longer held the truth.

And Sae…Sae didn’t stop you. Because, just maybe, he knew too. That love, no matter how many times you say it, it can’t survive when all that is left is the echo of what it used to be.