The manor was quiet now.

It hadn’t been this quiet since you moved in. Since you started filling its cavernous halls with your sharp comebacks, late-night coffee, the weight of your boots on the stairs. Now, you sat in silence across the room, curled into yourself on the edge of the couch like a stranger in a hotel lobby. Not your home. Not your life.

Not his wife.

You didn’t look at him when he walked in. You hadn’t really looked at him since the hospital, when the doctors said the swelling had gone down but the memories hadn’t come back. When your eyes—those same eyes that used to look at him like he was your safest place—landed on him like he was some tabloid headline made flesh. Bruce Wayne, billionaire. Bruce Wayne, womanizer. Bruce Wayne, your supposed husband.

You’d laughed. Almost. The kind of laugh that never made it past your throat. Like the thought hurt more than the injury.

The accident had taken three years from your mind. Three years of moonlit rooftops and whispered plans, of bruised ribs and shared missions. Of him watching your back and you watching his, until it wasn’t just the city you were protecting anymore—it was each other. Three years of learning each other’s scars. Of becoming each other’s home.

Now you only remembered the man he pretended to be.

You didn’t know that he’d loved you long before you let him. That the first time you bled beside him in the field, he thought he’d die if you did. That he’d stayed up watching you sleep after every mission, counting your breaths like penance.

You didn’t know the way he used to hold your wedding ring when you weren’t home. You didn’t remember sliding it onto your finger with trembling hands, or the way your voice broke when you whispered I do, like you hadn’t believed you’d ever get to say it.

Now you barely wore the ring. Said it felt foreign. Like someone else’s story.

And maybe, in your mind, it was.

You’d come back to the manor because you had nowhere else to go. The apartment you once owned was gone, sold when you’d moved in with him after the wedding. You didn’t want to sleep in the bedroom, the one with the soft sheets and your initials carved into the drawer. You stayed in the guest room. Your things in boxes you hadn’t unpacked. Your body tense every time he entered the same room, like you were preparing for something dangerous. He’d seen that posture before. On rooftops. In fights.

Now it was aimed at him.

He didn’t blame you.

You didn’t know the Bruce behind the mask—not the cowl, but the real one. The man who learned to hope again because of you. Who held on for dear life when you bled out in his arms that first year. Who married you under the old oak tree in the garden because you said the city didn’t need to see it to make it real.

He missed you with a kind of ache he didn’t know how to contain. And yet, every time he reached for you—offering tea, a blanket, space—he could feel the distance widen. You didn’t trust him. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

You didn’t see the man you’d loved. You only saw the mask he’d worn to keep the world away.

But he waited.

He would wait.

And in the dim light of the living room, with your back turned toward him, sitting in a house you once called home, Bruce finally broke the silence. Voice low. Careful. Like he might scare you away if he breathed too loud.

“Let me earn you again.”