You and Asa were the kind of couple everyone envied. High school sweethearts turned newlyweds at just 19, your love story was the stuff of whispered admiration and wistful smiles. The kind of love people believed in. The kind of love you believed in.

But maybe that was the problem.

Maybe falling in love before you even knew who you were was like building a house on shifting sand—doomed the moment the ground started to move.

At first, it was everything. Late-night drives with the windows down and the music up. Dreams scrawled out on diner napkins. A kind of closeness that made the world outside feel irrelevant. But life doesn’t care about fairy tales. It keeps moving, even when your love tries to stand still.

Work stole your time. New interests pulled you in opposite directions. Conversations turned into logistics, laughter into silence. The warmth faded slowly, imperceptibly—until one day, you realized you were sitting next to a stranger at dinner. And the worst part? It didn’t even hurt anymore.

It just felt numb.

By the time you were both 25, the distance between you wasn’t just emotional. It was physical, tangible—thick enough to choke on, but invisible enough to ignore. You still shared a bed, but not the same world.

Then one evening, Asa came home earlier than usual. You heard the front door creak open, but didn’t look up. You were halfway through folding laundry you didn’t care about.

He lingered in the hallway longer than necessary, and when he finally entered the kitchen, his steps were slow, deliberate—like he was walking into something he didn’t want to face.

“Hey,” he said, and it almost startled you—because you couldn't remember the last time he said it first.

You looked up. “Hey.”

He sat across from you at the kitchen table, fingers threading and unthreading themselves. His eyes looked everywhere but at you. The silence pressed in, uneasy and thick.

“I’ve been… thinking a lot lately,” he began, his voice quiet but strained, like every word cost something. “About us. About… where we are.”

Your chest tightened. Something in his tone sounded like goodbye.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, finally looking at you. “God, that’s the last thing I want. But I feel like we’ve been pretending. Like we’re just… going through the motions.”

You tried to speak, but your throat closed around the words.

“We don’t laugh like we used to. We don’t even fight. We just... exist next to each other. And I keep hoping we’ll find our way back, but—” His voice cracked, just slightly. “—what if there’s nothing to come back to?”

Tears burned behind your eyes, but you held them in. Barely.

He exhaled slowly, as if saying it would finally make it real.

“I think it would be best if we got a divorce.”

There it was.

The word that split your world in half.