He Married Her While I Waited at the Altar, I Called My Mother While She Called Me Back Chapter 06
“I passed the interview. I start onboarding next Monday.”
When I told Riley this, she was crouching on the floor stuffing things into my suitcase.
A bag of beef jerky, two boxes of instant noodles, some wet wipes, and a box of K-Cup pods she usually saved for herself.
“Bayview City is so far.”
“Far is good.”
She didn’t respond, just kept her head down, violently shoving the corners of the instant noodle
boxes into the gaps in the suitcase.
It took her a long while to look up at me. Her eyes were red, but tears hadn’t fallen.
“Does your heart really not hurt for him anymore?”
“Riley, let me tell you something.”
“Yeah.”
“I lived in his house for three years, waking up at 5:30 every morning to make breakfast. The
oatmeal takes forty minutes to cook, his sunny-side-up eggs have to be perfect, and the bacon has
to be extra crispy.”
“He never said it was good, and never said it was bad. After eating, he’d push his plate to the sink,
grab his bag, and leave. The sound of the door closing was sharper than him saying goodbye.”
“Three years. He never washed the dishes once.”
Riley listened, frowning.
“I thought he just didn’t know how to do chores. But before I moved in, he lived alone for two years.
His kitchen counters were spotless, he sorted his recycling better than I did, and there weren’t even
any takeout boxes lying around.”
“It’s not that he didn’t know how to wash dishes. He just felt he didn’t need to do it for me.”
Riley shut her mouth and crouched there without moving for a long time.
The day before I left, Mason forwarded a few messages from the group chat to Riley again.
She hesitated but still showed them to me.
Someone had sent a picture to the group.
Julian was standing in front of the stove, staring into a frying pan holding a burnt egg, its edges completely blackened.
He took a photo and sent it to the group, adding the text: [I just realized how hard it is to make
these.]
Someone replied underneath.
[Didn’t Stella make those for you every day? Perfect sunny-side-up eggs, never burnt.]
He didn’t reply and immediately left the group chat.
Ten minutes later, he rejoined.
Riley tilted her head and looked at me.
“What’s the psychology behind leaving and rejoining?”
“He doesn’t want to hear the truth, but he also can’t help but check if anyone is talking about me.”
She clicked her tongue, then swiped her screen.
“There’s something else. Want to see?”
“What?”
“Hailey got into a fight with him.”
She turned the phone toward me.
Hailey had posted a long rant on Instagram Stories.
Pink background, with a selfie of her looking wronged, a tear at the corner of her eye.
The gist was that her life was miserable right now. She complained that Julian’s temper was getting worse and that he snapped at her for no reason.
He wouldn’t do chores, wouldn’t cook, wouldn’t take out the trash, and wouldn’t even buy her the designer bag she wanted.
The text was long, but it boiled down to one sentence:
“I gave up so much for you, and this is how you treat me?”
What exactly had she given up for him?
I gave up a $300,000 Management Trainee program.
I gave up my parents.
I gave up three years of my savings.
I gave up the version of myself that could have been so much better.
Amidst a sea of comforting comments, there was one glaring reply.
A mutual friend had written:
[Hailey, are you really saying that… Stella gave up way more than that for him back then.]
Hailey deleted the post in seconds.
But the screenshot was already circulating.
Deleting it quickly was useless; the internet never forgets.
The last thing Riley showed me was a screenshot of a private DM.
I don’t know who leaked it, but it was a conversation between Julian and an old college friend.
He said:[I just realized Stella used to pay my mortgage and car loan every month. She even bought the health supplements for my mom. The holiday check we gave my mom last Christmas? She paid for that too. How did I not know any of this?]
His friend replied: [Because she did it without complaining. And you never bothered to ask.]
He replied with two words: [Shut up.]
Riley watched my expression and asked cautiously, “How do
I didn’t answer her question.
I was thinking about something else.
you feel?”
That notebook. The notebook I hid under the mattress in the guest room.
Brown cover, frayed edges, with one line written on it.
(One Hundred Little Things About Julian.]
! had written down sixty-seven entries. The sixty-eighth was unfinished, the ink trailing off
mid-sentence.
I wondered if he found it when he lifted the mattress.
Riley seemed to know what I was thinking and sent another text.
“Mason said he found that notebook. After reading it, he sat alone in the guest room for over an
hour.”
“And then?”
“Then Hailey called him to go wedding dress shopping.”
“Did he go?”
“He went.”
When Hailey called, he put the notebook down and went.
When I called him, he told me we’d talk later.
It had been this way for three years.
He replied to Hailey in seconds, while leaving my messages on read.
This wasn’t carelessness.
This was a ranking of priorities.
I was never a priority to him.
Riley stared at me for a long time.
“You’re not even crying.”
“I already cried. I cried all my tears outside the ballroom that day.”
“It’s enough. I don’t want to cry anymore.”