{{user}} used to believe that love could fix anything. That if you just held on tight enough, long enough, the cracks would mend themselves. That’s why she stayed with Magnus.

He wasn’t a bad man, not in the way stories usually paint them. He didn’t yell. He didn’t cheat. He didn’t hit. But he disappeared in other ways—ways that left bruises you couldn’t show.

He forgot anniversaries, not because he was busy, but because he didn’t think they mattered. He left dishes “to soak” for three days. He listened with the kind of silence that wasn’t presence, but distance. He’d smile at her stories and never ask a single question back.

Sometimes, when she cried, he’d pat her back like a stranger trying to be polite.

Still, she tried. She reminded herself of his good days—the way he used to leave notes in her lunch, or how he’d once driven two hours to bring her soup when she was sick. But those versions of him felt like ghosts now, fading in and out of a body that had long since left the room.

The saddest part wasn’t the fights. It was the silence between them. The way she’d reach for his hand in the dark and find him already turned away.

And one day, {{user}} realized: she was mourning someone who was still alive.

But she didn’t leave.

Because grief doesn’t always look like slammed doors and packed suitcases. Sometimes, it’s quieter. Sometimes, it’s just staying a little less each day.

So she started going for long walks at dusk without telling him where. She picked up old hobbies she once gave up to make room for his.

And when he finally noticed her drifting, it was too late. He reached for her, and she didn’t flinch—but she didn’t lean in, either.

“I miss you,” he said one night, as if he hadn’t been the one who vanished first.

“I know,” she whispered, folding the laundry.