I Quit Loving You The Day I Walked Away

"You promised me you'd have one custom-made, fireworks that would spell out my name when they bloomed in the sky. Did you do it?"

Dana's face flickered in and out of the darkness.

My hands shook, and I could barely keep hold of the phone.

"I did it," he said.

Something inside my head snapped.

I suddenly remembered that night Dana confessed, how his gaze had passed through me as if he were looking at something far away.

So it turned out that in the sky behind me, Samantha's name had been written. She was the one he'd really meant to confess to.

So it turned out our beginning had been a mistake all along.

The words had barely left Dana's mouth when the sky overhead lit up bright as noon.

A thousand fireworks burst open before the two of them.

Samantha's tears spilled over.

The comment section lost its mind, tens of thousands of blessings and envious gushing pouring in.

Someone asked: "Then why did you two break up back then?"

Of all the comments, Samantha singled out that one to reply: "Because of a certain person. If not for her, I would never have been left homeless in a foreign country."

One sentence, and the waves rose a thousand layers high.

The internet mob was a powerful thing. My social accounts were overrun in no time.

My inbox flooded with every kind of vicious curse.

I stood, dug through the drawer, and pulled out the itemized wedding costs, the recording of his proposal, and the old security footage I'd saved from that night.

I'd kept all of it, carefully, as keepsakes.

I opened my account, drafted a long post, and attached the list of evidence.

A second before I tapped send, the phone was yanked out of my hand.

Dana stood in front of me, scrolling through the proof, his face dark enough to drip water.

"Doing this will destroy Samantha."

Right in front of me, he deleted everything I'd labored over, then hurled the phone to the floor and ground it to pieces under his heel.

He tore the printouts to shreds too, scattering them into the trash.

Something in me snapped.

"But she's already destroyed me!"

My finger jabbed hard into Dana's chest.

"That scale in your heart has never once tipped toward me."

"And the multiple-choice question of your life only ever had one answer."

"Dana, I hate you to the bone."

I grabbed my suitcase and turned to leave, but he caught my arm and hauled me back.

I wrenched free and turned. Dana's eyes were bloodshot.

"Where do you think you're going? Until this dies down online, you're not going anywhere!"

"Let go of me!"

In the middle of the struggle, a mocking voice rang out behind me.

Patrick stood in the doorway holding a length of rope, one corner of his mouth curled up.

"Three days are up, Carmen. I've come to tie you up and drag you home."