Where I Stood Waiting

Five years into therapy, my doctor pushed a consent form across the desk. "Electroconvulsive therapy is the most effective treatment available. But there's a strong chance you'll lose a significant portion of your memories." I stared at the form for a long moment, then picked up the phone and called my wife, Celeste Kendrick. As always, the call was routed to her company's front desk. "I'm sorry, Mr. Hartley. Ms. Kendrick is in a meeting." The receptionist's response was brief and professional. The whole exchange lasted less than three seconds. Five years ago, my mother died in an accident on the same day as our wedding. I left Celeste at the altar. After that, we were married on paper and strangers in every way that mattered. When I called to ask if she was coming home, the call would go straight to the front desk. When I needed a family member's signature for surgery, the call would go to the front desk. Even when I was falling apart and just needed to hear her voice, all I ever got was the receptionist's rehearsed reply. I opened our message history. She had read every single message and never replied to one. Yet just one minute earlier, she had posted on social media. Chapter 1 Everett's POV Celeste Kendrick had taken her first love, Kieran Vance, to the Faerholme coast to chase the northern lights and to Lake Corvin to watch swans glide along the water. This time, she had chartered an entire yacht for him, with fireworks that lasted through the night, all to celebrate ten years since they first met. My fingers hovered over the screen. I swallowed the bitterness rising in my chest and reached for the consent form the doctor had been about to put away. "I'll sign it." Signing it took nearly everything I had left. The doctor took the form, glanced at it, then looked back at me with an expression I could not quite read. "You're not going to talk this over with your family first? There's a real chance you'll forget all of them." I shook my head slowly and tugged my sleeve down to cover the needle marks scattered across the back of my hand. "No. She doesn't need to know." I went into the operating room, and when I woke up, the first round of treatment was over. My head felt heavy and slow, and the doctor went over his instructions before I left. "Try to go over your old memories whenever you can, and keep taking your medication. I'm worried that if you don't, you'll end up forgetting who you are." I nodded, picked up a new prescription for sleeping pills, and went home. When I got there, my hand rested on the door handle for a long time before I could turn it. The door was unlocked. Light seeped out through the gap. Celeste was home. I was surprised. By my count, she had not been back in over a month. She heard me come in and turned to look, her brows furrowing as she took me in. "It's been a few days and you already look like death. Are you doing this on purpose to make me feel bad?" My hands stilled in mid-air. Something sharp twisted behind my ribs. I set the pill bottle on the table and noticed the cake sitting on the dining table. It looked familiar, but I could not remember ordering one. When I said nothing, Celeste stood up from the couch. "Don't think doing all of this is going to make me forgive you." Everything she said had a bite to it, but today, none of it was making sense. "What do you mean?" She did not answer. She just stared at me. "The receptionist told me you called today. What did you need? I was busy." The fog in my head cleared in an instant. I thought of the photos she had been posting, and something about the whole situation suddenly struck me as pathetic. "Busy doing what? Taking trips with Kieran? Watching fireworks with him? Or were you too busy sleeping with him?" Celeste's face went white, the kind of fury that came from being caught. "What the hell is that supposed to mean, Everett Hartley?" I opened my mouth to respond, but before I could get a word out, a sharp pain tore through my shoulder. Kieran had walked in behind me and slammed into me hard enough to knock me sideways. He draped an arm over Celeste's shoulder. The marks on her neck had not faded yet. The sight of them burned. "I told you there was no point coming back just for him. He calls you multiple times a month anyway. It's just for attention, yet you actually fell for it. You came all the way back here for nothing." Kieran's voice was light, almost bored. Yet Celeste believed every word he said. She always did. The room went still. She let out a cold laugh, and before I could react, she grabbed the cake off the table and shoved it into my face. Frosting smeared across my skin and dropped to the floor in clumps. I stood there, frozen. The ache in my chest spread outward through my limbs, and the ringing in my ears grew louder. Celeste was still shouting, but her voice had blurred into something I could barely make out. "You've always loved playing the victim, Everett, but now, you're playing mind games too? When did you learn to be such a liar? Oh, wait. You've always been one. You lied to me five years ago." Her eyes were red-rimmed, and her chest was heaving. Then, her gaze dropped to my wrists, and her eyes widened. She grabbed my wrist and yanked the sleeve up. When she saw the dense scatter of needle marks across my skin, she froze for just a second before letting out a sharp, humorless laugh. "This again." Even Kieran sucked in a breath at the sight. He pulled Celeste behind him and murmured something to calm her down. "Forget it. Don't let him get to you. I'll take you out for your birthday." He took Celeste's hand and started toward the door. As he passed me, he slowed just enough to lean in, his voice low enough that only I could hear. "Look at yourself, Everett. What do you have left to compete with?" The door slammed shut behind them, and they were gone. It was only then, standing alone in the quiet, that I remembered. Today was Celeste's birthday. The cake she had smashed into my face was one I had baked for her myself the night before. I had just forgotten. I went to the bathroom and splashed water over my face again and again. When I finally looked up, the man staring back at me from the mirror was hollow-eyed with cheekbones jutting out. I looked like someone already halfway dead. Chapter 2 I shook out a handful of pills and shoved them into my mouth, forcing them down dry. The bitterness spread across my tongue. I sank back into the couch, tipped my head against the cushion, and stared at the ceiling without moving. Celeste had always believed that I had lied to her, that I had betrayed her. Five years ago, at our wedding, I had walked out in front of everyone. I left her standing there alone and turned her into a joke across the whole of Mayworth City. That night, she grabbed me by the collar and screamed until her voice broke. "You did that on purpose, didn't you? You wanted to humiliate me." I tried to explain, over and over. "My mom was old, and she lived so far away. I never planned for her to come to the wedding. But she came on her own without telling me, and on the way there, the tractor she was riding flipped. She didn't make it." It did not matter what I said. She would not hear a single word of it. She pulled off her wedding ring and hurled it at the wedding portrait hanging on the wall. The frame crashed to the floor, and the glass shattered on impact. A shard even caught my face. Celeste stared at me through bloodshot eyes, her smile cold and thin. "You're still lying to me. I should've listened to Kieran and stayed away from you. They were right. You came from nowhere, and you just married me for the money." She turned away and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "I'll hate you for the rest of my life, Everett." After that, it was exactly the way she said it would be. We destroyed each other. After I walked out on our wedding, her first love came back to the country without bothering to hide it, and the two of them grew closer by the day. I became the punchline in every conversation. "Everett Hartley. You know, the one who married Celeste Kendrick? He shouldn't have bothered. She doesn't even go home." "Oh, and get this. Apparently, Celeste and Kieran getting back together is all thanks to Everett. He practically set them up himself." Five years of marriage, and every time I tried to reach her, my call was routed to her company's front desk. All I ever got was the same line from the receptionist. "Ms. Kendrick is busy." Celeste never blocked me on any of her social accounts. Every post was deliberate, every photo curated. She knew I would see all of it. She wanted me to understand that she was doing just fine without me. The worst it ever got between us was three weeks after my mother died. Between Celeste's hostility and the weight of losing my mother, everything that had been pressing down on me finally crushed me. I broke down completely. I called Celeste's number again and again. "Please, just let me talk to her. I'm begging you. Please help me." The receptionist's voice was cold and faintly disgusted. "I'm sorry, Mr. Hartley. Ms. Kendrick has a very full schedule." The line went dead, and after that, the number would not connect at all. I destroyed everything in the apartment that I could get my hands on. When I looked down at the broken pieces scattered across the floor, I picked one up without hesitation and dragged it across my wrist. In the end, it was the housekeeper who found me and rushed me to the hospital. When I woke up, Celeste was sitting beside my bed. Her gaze drifted to the bandages around my wrist, and there was nothing in her expression but indifference. "Is this really the best way you can think of to get my attention? It's getting pathetic. Next time, cut deeper. And if you want to die, do it somewhere I don't have to deal with it." She stood up and turned to leave. I reached out and grabbed her sleeve with what little strength I had. "I wasn't lying to you. Everything I told you was the truth. Please, don't do this to me." She shook my hand off and looked down at me. "Whether you lied or not doesn't matter to me anymore. I came here to tell you that I fired the housekeeper because of you. Is this just what you do? Ruin everyone who gets close to you?" The side effects of the medication hit all at once. My chest tightened until I could barely breathe, and all I could do was gulp down air in shallow gasps. My vision blurred and dimmed. Sleep like this was the only kind that did not bring nightmares. Chapter 3 The next time Celeste contacted me, I had just finished the second round of treatment. My head was still foggy when the call came in, and it took a moment before her voice registered on the other end, cool and clipped. "Company dinner. I'm sending you the address." That was all she said before she hung up. I stared at the dark screen for a long time, not quite able to process it. This was the first time in five years that she had reached out to me on her own. Her company held a staff dinner every three months as a perk for the employees. Celeste always brought Kieran. My pulse picked up, and I felt something close to excitement for the first time in a long while. When I arrived at the restaurant, the server at the front barely glanced at me. "Mr. Hartley? Ms. Kendrick is in the private room at the end of the hall." The corridor was quiet. The sound of laughter only reached me when I got to the last room. When I pushed the door open, every voice cut off at once, and every pair of eyes in the room locked on me. The urge to turn and leave hit me immediately. I scanned the table and spotted Celeste right away, seated at the head. Kieran was beside her. There was no seat saved for me. I stood there for a while before finally taking the only empty chair, tucked away in the far corner. "What are you sitting around for? Have a drink." Kieran's comment loosened the strange tension in the room by a few degrees. A couple of employees knocked back their drinks and started getting bold. "Ms. Kendrick, you and Mr. Vance are always together. What is it about him that you like?" That single question set off a wave of gossip around the table. Someone even shot me a pointed look. Celeste did not hold back, as if I were not even in the room. "Kieran and I have known each other for over ten years. Having him come on as my director makes me happy. As for what I like about him, I suppose it's that he's always been there." Someone whistled the moment she finished, and the teasing started bouncing around the table. They all knew Celeste was married. They all knew about the situation between us, and whether it was to suck up to her or simply because they found it entertaining, every question they lobbed felt like it was designed to humiliate me. Celeste treated me like I was not there for the entire evening. I understood now why she had asked me to come. She just wanted to watch me squirm. I kept my head down and stared at my plate, my grip tightening around my utensils. When the conversation turned to what Kieran liked to do, Celeste answered without a second of hesitation. "He likes to travel. We've been to Nordvik, Altenbach, and the Faerholme coast together." I already knew that. While they were off on their trips, I had been swallowing pills and scrolling through Celeste's photos like a fool. "What about Mr. Hartley?" The question landed on me out of nowhere. Every head in the room turned my way, and I looked up dazedly, locking eyes with Celeste. One of the employees who had been stirring things up grinned at me. "You've been married to Ms. Kendrick for so long. You must know what she likes, right?" I opened my mouth. The words caught in my throat. My mind felt like it was wrapped in fog. I tried to search for those memories, but it was as if they had all slipped away. "I forgot." Celeste's expression darkened instantly. She set her glass down on the table hard enough to make a sound, and the room went quiet. It was Kieran who broke the silence, raising his glass in my direction with a casual tilt. "Not everyone can keep track of everything she likes. Don't give him a hard time. Here, have a drink. Don't kill the mood." A few people who knew both of us exchanged glances, looking like they wanted to say something but held back. "Isn't he allergic to alcohol?" Kieran looked surprised and glanced over at Celeste. "Is that true?" Celeste's brows furrowed, and she looked away. Her voice was hard and cold. "I forgot. Just drink it, Everett. Stop ruining everything." I looked at her. My fingers were numb, and my head felt like it was splitting open. I picked up the glass and drained it in one go. Almost the instant I swallowed, Celeste shot to her feet, her face white. "Are you out of your mind, Everett?" Chapter 4 It was strange. Celeste was the one who had told me to drink, and yet she was the one panicking. My stomach burned, every breath was a struggle, and red welts were spreading across my skin. Everyone at the table looked shaken. Celeste held me up, her fingers trembling as she dialed for an ambulance. "Did you do this just to spite me? You knew you couldn't drink, so why did you? You win, okay? I forgive you. We can have another wedding. We'll do it over." I could not make out the rest. All I remembered was being lifted onto a stretcher. Everything in front of me blurred. Celeste had said she forgave me. For five years, that was all I had been waiting to hear. Somehow, now that I finally had, all I felt was tired. My voice came out raw and barely there. "There's no need." Celeste pressed close, leaning near my mouth, trying to catch what I was saying. I steadied my breathing and managed one more sentence. "If you want, we can get a divorce." Celeste's eyes went wide, filled with shock and fury. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out. I was already unconscious. … When I woke up again, it was the next day. The hospital room was empty and quiet. My phone was buzzing on the bedside table. There were over a dozen missed calls, all from other people. I picked up the first one, and the voice on the other end was frantic. "What's going on with you and Celeste? She went and took wedding portraits with Kieran Vance. Are you two divorced? How could you not tell anyone about something this big?" The voice was loud enough to send a sharp throbbing through my temples. Celeste's social accounts were still public to me. Her latest post was pinned at the top. It was her wedding portrait with Kieran, and there was a single caption underneath: [I'm still waiting for you.] My fingers hovered over the screen. Tears fell without warning, landing on the screen and beading up on the surface. I was crying, yet I did not feel sad at all. The weight I had been carrying for five years had finally shattered, and for the first time, everything felt light. The door to the hospital room swung open. It was my therapist. "Mr. Hartley, what a coincidence. I just spoke with your attending physician, and he says you're fine now. Today happens to be the right day for your third round of treatment." I glanced down at my phone one last time, then turned off the screen. "Alright." Before I went into the operating room, Celeste called. "Everett, I'm at the studio right now. If you want to..." "Mr. Hartley, the procedure is about to start. We'll hold onto your phone for now." Celeste's voice faltered on the other end. Then, it rose sharply. "Procedure? What procedure?" The call cut off before she could finish. The doors to the operating room closed, inch by inch. This time, I was the one letting go first.