Five Years Of Marriage And I Was A Name He’d Never Mentioned Chapter 06

Five Years Of Marriage And I Was A Name He’d Never Mentioned Chapter 06

Back home, I started packing.

In the closet, the pajamas we bought for the wedding still hung there. On the balcony, the succulent he picked out for me was still sitting there. The matching slippers by the door—I’d worn them for five years.

I looked at each thing and felt nothing but irony.

When a person’s heart changes, even the traces of when they were sincere turn into a joke.

Brandon came home to find two suitcases already packed.

He stood in the doorway, his eyes completely red.

“You’re really leaving?”

“Yeah.”

I zipped the last bag without even looking at him.

He walked over and pressed his hand down on one of the suitcases, his voice tight.

“Lauren, I never went that far with Ivy.”

“I admit I lied to her. And I lied to you. But I never touched her.”

I stopped.

Then slowly looked up. “So?”

“You think that just because you didn’t sleep with her, it’s not betrayal?”

Brandon’s face went tight.

I looked at him and said each word clearly. “You didn’t touch her, but you remembered how she likes her coffee. You remembered which streets she likes to walk. You remembered every casual thing she ever said.”

“You gave her the patience, the attention, the passion that should have been mine.”

“Brandon. Physical or emotional, there’s no difference to me.”

His fingers went white at the knuckles. After a long moment, his voice came out hoarse. “I didn’t want a divorce.”

“I just… made a mistake.”

“A mistake?” I laughed, but tears came with it. “Your ‘mistake’ was seeing her behind my back. Lying to her that you were single. Thinking about another woman while holding me every night and telling me you missed me.”

“Brandon, what exactly did you take me for?”

He had no answer.

I wiped my face and called my mom.

An hour later, my parents arrived.

The second my mom walked in and saw my red eyes, she didn’t ask a single question. She just pulled me into her arms.

“Come on. We’re going home.”

I nodded, and the tears fell even harder.

Brandon stood in the middle of the living room, his voice dry. “Mom…”

“Don’t call me Mom.” My mother’s voice was ice. “I can’t accept that.”

My dad was always calm, but that day he didn’t bother with polite formalities either.

He looked at Brandon, and his gaze was heavy.

“When you were first starting your business and struggling, Lauren didn’t want to hurt your pride. So she begged me to throw some work your way.”

“When your mom was in the hospital, Lauren paid for it out of her own savings.”

“Your first suit. Your first decent watch. The flower baskets at your company opening—she saved up for every single one of them.”

“She never once mentioned any of this to you.”

“Because she said she loved you. It wasn’t a transaction. She didn’t need to be paid back.”

My parents had never mentioned any of this in front of Brandon before.

And clearly, he was hearing it for the first time.

He stood frozen, disbelief flooding his eyes.

“Lauren… why didn’t you ever tell me?”

I looked at him, my heart aching with each beat.

“Tell you what?”

“Tell you that I quietly put my own future and savings on hold so you could look good?”

“Or tell you that I’d rather be the one who sacrificed a little so you could feel like the world was on your side?”

“Brandon, when I loved you, I didn’t see it as sacrifice.”

“But now I realize—it’s not that I never thought about myself. It’s that I put myself so far last.”

The red in his eyes deepened.

Not anger.

It was remorse, arriving too late and almost crushing him.

My dad picked up the suitcases, his voice calm and firm. “The debt is paid. We’re not going to use the past against you.”

“But from now on, you no longer have the right to make my daughter shed a single tear.”

That day, I left the home I’d lived in for five years with my parents.

Brandon stood at the door. He didn’t follow.

He just watched me with red eyes, like he finally understood that he hadn’t lost a wife who would come home.

He had lost someone who once put him at the very front of her life.