Sweet Romance13 min read
Ex-Husband, Keep Some Decency
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I am Jadyn Bates. The night Colin Ibrahim asked for a divorce was a bright, cruel afternoon. He sat on our balcony swing, the little string lights still twinkling even in daylight, and he said three words that made my heart stop.
"We should divorce."
I almost dropped my phone. I asked, "Why?"
"He came back."
Colin said it like a fact. He put his cigarette out in the ashtray and did not look at me. His right hand trembled. He had always been good at making final words sound inevitable.
"Okay," I said. My voice shook so I squeezed my thigh to prove I was still solid. He told me the arrangements like he was reading a list from a polite office.
"I'll pay you what we agreed. The house goes to you. The car too. Forty percent of the company."
He paused and asked, "Anything else you want?"
I said no. I learned to make my face calm very early. He left the key on the coffee table. He said he'd send the paperwork through Liu — Graham Brooks — their company lawyer. He left.
I watched him go, then sat on the swing he bought me for my birthday. I used to love the small things—the swing, the way the string lights blinked when the wind came. I hugged the dog and counted the hours until he would come home. After he left me, I sold the swing. It hurt less if small things changed.
"He came back." Those words set my life spinning. Jolie Dumont had always been his white moonlight. She left to study abroad years ago. I met Colin after she left. I made a whole plan to be near him: mountain-club, hikes, even luggage that was far too heavy for a morning. I learned how to make myself ordinary in the places that mattered to him.
"I saw him yesterday," I told myself. "It was fate that brought us together."
But fate is not kind to someone who pretends to be less than herself for the comfort of another person.
The early days were full of small borrowed happinesses. Colin would buy red sugar porridge when I had cramps. He would bring a roll of tape and fix the broken lid of a jar. He would laugh quietly at my jokes sometimes. Those things made me think, in soft moments, that maybe he did love me. Then the phone would light up with Jolie's name and all the small kindnesses became sad punctuation marks.
One night when we were younger and reckless, I found him drunk in a friend's room. I sat with him, held him, and somehow we fell together again. He said, "We should try." I said nothing because I was too tired of arguing with my heart.
Time had a way of smoothing the edges. We married, in an ordinary way with ordinary expectations. His family watched. We had seconds of warmth. But there were always photographs: Jolie with her bright smile, Jolie with Colin on a ferris wheel. I found myself comparing my quiet smile to her sunlit laugh.
When Jolie came back and said she was pregnant, Colin chose the other path. He said he had to be responsible. I did not fight. I left before I could bargain him into staying. I told myself he would be happier. I told myself that I had already been stealing small amounts of him for years.
After the divorce, I started to cook for cameras. I became a food vlogger. I learned to be brave in a new way — alone in a kitchen under bright lights. I made recipes that fit my hands. I filmed bowl after bowl. My followers asked about my husband and I made polite, practiced jokes. Many wanted to meet him. He hated cameras, so he rarely appeared. Once, he sat down with me for a live stream and said, "I chased her." His soft, careless confession made my smile fray.
"You chased me?" I asked, and my smile was a practiced thing. He said nothing else about why he had chased me then, only that he wanted to take responsibility. Later he would tell Jolie that responsibility had a different meaning.
Then came the night at the restaurant.
Graham Brooks — the fat, loud boss who had been leering at me for months — finally leaned too close. He was a man who believed his power allowed him small cruelties. He touched the back of my hand when he thought no one was looking. I moved, said I needed the restroom, and left.
In the restroom, I called Sawyer Ferrari.
"Are you okay?" he asked into the phone. Sawyer had a way of asking that made a person feel like someone had finally noticed the traffic lights inside their chest.
"I'm fine," I lied. "I just need a minute."
I washed my hands until they were pruney and walked out. In the corridor I saw someone I never expected to see again: Colin. His shirt was torn. His right hand was cut and bleeding; glass shards glittered like cruel stars against his palm. He looked like a man who had been fighting with life and lost teeth in the struggle.
"Since you want to sponge off someone," he said to me in a voice that hurt, "why not come to me?"
I laughed, though nothing felt funny. "Ex-husband, keep some decency," I said.
He grabbed me from behind, a brief violence that smelled of alcohol and regret. "Did you ever love me?" he whispered.
"It doesn't matter now," I said. I moved away and found Sawyer at the doorway, his face sudden with alarm.
"Jadyn, are you hurt? Who did this?" he demanded.
Colin's voice dropped to an ugly gravel. "If she wanted someone to feed her, she could have come to me."
Sawyer's fingers tightened around my hand like a clamp. "She doesn't belong to you."
I left with Sawyer. I left Colin in the doorway with a blood-smeared palm and the taste of glass in his mouth. He muttered, "I regret it," and the words fell like a penny in a well.
After that night, things escalated in ways I never wanted. My followers speculated wildly. Journalists texted. A picture of Colin's bloody hand leaked; a rumor claimed he had smashed the glass himself in a fit of despair. I found Jolie at the maternity clinic one afternoon and learned the full story of what happened between Jolie and Colin years ago. They had been messy friends, then lovers, then strangers, and a short mistake had turned into a life. She was not a villain. She was a frightened woman with a child on the way.
"You're not the only one who lost something," she said to me, voice raw. "I didn't mean to step into your life like this."
"I don't need apologies," I said. "I need peace."
Jolie cried and apologized and we held each other's hands for a minute like two women who had been arranged by fate into a triangle that should never have existed. I learned then that people make mistakes, and sometimes the measure of a mistake is the way others choose to set their feet afterwards.
Meanwhile, a terrible thing happened that the internet did not see. Graham Brooks — the boss who had tried to touch me — believed himself untouchable. He reached out to me at a business dinner one night with a hand that thought of boundaries as optional.
I excused myself, went to the bathroom, and when I came out Colin was standing by the entrance, his shirt ripped, the glass in his hand. His presence surprised me. He limped toward me like a man dragged by guilt.
"Since you want to feed off someone," he said again, voice low, "why didn't you come back to me?"
"I am your ex," I said. "Please hold some decency."
He couldn't. He held me from behind. Sawyer arrived and saw us. Colin's face went strange; he looked like a man who had been flayed.
That scene could have been quiet and terrible, but it was not. Graham reached across the table without shame and tried to put a hand on my knee. Sawyer rose like a man who had been coaxed into a cage and then handed a door.
"Get your hands off her," Sawyer said.
Graham laughed first, a harsh bark. "And who are you to tell me that?"
"I'm her partner," Sawyer said, and his voice had that calm that always scared me. "Leave her alone."
Graham had no shame, but he did have a crowd. When he touched Sawyer's sleeve to push him away, someone at the next table raised a camera. Phones came out. People shouted. The restaurant hushed, surprised a small play was unrolling just beyond their silverware.
Later, because the law moves slow and the press moves faster, I decided to make the punishment public and make it hurt the one who thought he had immunity.
I posted a video.
It wasn't a confessional. It was a step-by-step account. I described the night, the fumble in the restaurant, the feel of Graham's hand, the words he whispered. I showed a photograph of his greasy wristwatch. I asked for witnesses to come forward and share their stories.
"Gentlemen like Graham," I said into camera, "believe the world owes them small cruelties. It doesn't. If you touched me, you touched someone else. If you watched and did nothing, you became part of the story."
The video went viral. People who had been harassed at meetings and events began to send me private messages. Among them were three women who worked under Graham and who had never found the courage to speak. They agreed to meet me at an awards ceremony he would attend that weekend.
On the night, the hall sparkled with lights and fake smiles. Graham arrived in his best suit, the same man who thought he could slap a woman's knee at a table. He sat at the head table and laughed too loudly. He clinked glasses and basked in the glow of men who had never been questioned.
At 9 p.m. I walked on stage.
"Good evening," I said. The microphone carried my voice. "My name is Jadyn Bates. I make food videos. Tonight I am not here to cook."
The room shivered. People murmured.
"Several months ago, a man at this industry table believed he could touch me because no one would notice," I continued. "He is here tonight."
Heads turned. Cameras swung. Graham's eyes darted to me, then away. He smiled to cover it.
"Several women agreed to tell their stories tonight," I said. "They asked that this not be private."
A woman in the audience stood. "He cornered me in a lift," she said, voice small and sure. Two others stood in turn. "He squeezed my arm at an after-party." "He whispered I looked good for a married woman." The words landed like stones.
Graham's face flushed from arrogance to shock. His smile froze. A reporter leaned over and whispered to his cameraman. Phones rose. People took video like birds lifting into the sky.
"How dare you," Graham stammered, as laughter and whispers swirled.
"This isn't a joke," I said calmly. "This is about a man who thinks words are toys and bodies are optional."
He stood up, voice rising. "You're making this up. You want attention."
"No," another victim standing beside me said, voice shaking. "I don't want attention. I want my dignity back. I want to keep my job without being worried who will touch me."
A notebook fell from Graham's hand. He stepped back as if heat had burned him. "You can't do this," he said. "You can't ruin me."
"People who prey on others ruin themselves," I answered. The room leaned in. Some people looked at their phones, some whispered, some clapped — softly at first, then with force. The clapping turned into a chorus.
Reporters asked questions. "Can we get a statement?" they asked. Graham tried to smile but his expression kept cracking into thin paper. His colleagues turned away. A man who had once shared drinks with him now avoided his gaze like an electric line. Microphones recorded every step.
Graham's reaction went through a private theater: first denial, then anger, then a frightened scrambling to buy time. He tried to say his words were jokes, that it was a misunderstanding. I had prepared for this. I had the texts, the dates, the witnesses. Each time he blustered, a phone hummed with the recorded proof.
"You're destroying my career!" he shouted, voice high and brittle.
"You destroyed others' safety," I said. "We are simply telling the truth."
Around him, his world contracted. His sponsors called. An editor whispered to the event manager. People stood up and left the hall in small clusters. Social media exploded: #GrahamExposed trended in an hour. His company's PR line released a statement the next morning, an immediate distancing: "We do not tolerate misconduct." The agency host canceled his next two bookings.
Graham sat down eventually, a man whose shadow had been stolen. He opened his mouth to apologize and the words were weak. He tried the old gambit — "It was only one time" — and the room recited all the times. His big hands shook. He tried to stand in front of the cameras with the same grave smile and the smile didn't hold. People recorded his face and posted it. He muttered to his assistant and the assistant's face had pity. That night he went silent.
What I saw in that moment was a human unraveling. It was a process: boldness drained into shame, then into clumsy excuses, then into desperate bargaining. "I'll do anything," he said at one point under his breath. "This is a mistake." He looked at the crowd like someone looking for a rope.
The crowd reacted in various ways. Some whispered, some took his photo for the internet. A few people stayed behind and offered statements. One woman in particular stepped forward and said, "I thought it was my fault." Her voice was very small but it changed the room. A young man in the media stood up and said, "We will record your statement. We will make sure this doesn't just die."
Graham's final attempt was to get on the stage and kneel. He did not kneel to apologize to the women in a heartfelt way. He knelt like a man asking for the mercy of contacts. "Please," he begged. "Please, I can't lose everything."
Someone shouted, "Too late." The audience hissed. A camera captured the slow collapse of a man who had thought himself beyond consequence. As photographers clicked, he begged the room for privacy and his words were swallowed by the flash.
This is the punishment I remember: not a private arrest, not an isolated humiliation, but a complete public stripping of the arrogant armor. The change in Graham was visible: the puffed chest deflated, his speech shortened, his presence thinned. People recorded his face as a specimen. Then they turned away.
Afterwards, messages poured in. Women thanked me. Men apologized for looking away. Calls arrived from producers who wanted safer sets. The company that employed Graham offered to open investigations. The man who had once thought the world owed him small cruelties now had to face months of inquiry and the delicate architecture of a public fall. He had to speak into microphones, make statements he did not mean, answer questions from a journalist whose eyes were sharp.
"I was wrong," he wrote to me later in a short message. "I'm sorry."
It wasn't enough. I wanted him to understand what his tiny cruelties had done to the lives he touched. I wanted the world to change. He had to lose more than comfort; he had to lose the quiet privilege of being ordinary among those who were judged. For those watching, he became an example: small cruelties do not hide forever.
After Graham's fall, my channels filled with letters from strangers and old friends. I learned courage is contagious. It was Sawyer's hand that steadied me in the worst of it. He would make tea in the night, put a warm cloth on my forehead when I crawled into bed, and send me long, silly photos of his failed attempts at cooking. He told me one night, "I promise to peel your shrimp."
"What?" I said, laughing.
"Always," he said, but he did not say it like a line. He said it like a promise with a seam.
Those small, unglamorous moments — Sawyer fetching socks when my feet were cold, Sawyer showing up with a salt-and-chili kit because I had once said I wanted to learn — became the scaffolding of something stable. He is eleven years younger than I am, people whispered. That did not matter the way his hands did. He wasn't a rescuer on a white horse; he was a man who insisted to be present.
He helped me pack up the apartment I had shared with Colin. Boxes of old letters, dishes I never used, a velvet box with a ring inside that I had once accepted on a roof. "You don't have to throw everything away," he said softly. "Keep the parts that are yours."
I put the photograph Colin sent me years later — a shot taken on a glass bridge when we were still playing at courage — into a drawer. "Why keep it?" Sawyer asked.
"It's history," I said. "And I don't want to burn it. Some things are best left to fade."
We were married in a small ceremony two years later. The photographer told jokes to make us laugh. My mother didn't come, but my friends did. Sawyer read a short line he had written in a trembling voice: "For the woman who taught me what patience tastes like." I cried because I had never been more certain of a thing.
Colin called sometimes. One night he left a message I listened to but did not answer.
"Jadyn," he said, voice thin. "I want you to know I am sorry. Jolie had a daughter. She is beautiful. Sometimes late at night I think about what could have been. I regret it. I love you. I am sorry."
I sat on our old couch, hands folded. I felt something like mercy and then a cool, detached clarity. "I wish you well," I told his voicemail later. "We made different choices."
At our wedding, an envelope arrived anonymously with a photograph of the glass bridge. Sawyer noticed me slip it into my pocket and later asked, "Who sent it?"
"I know," I said, and I did. But the photograph was a relic. I slid it into the deepest drawer with the other things and closed it.
Some days I miss the easy small kindnesses from the past. Mostly I do not. Sawyer peels shrimp for me. When I get cramps, he brings me red sugar porridge in a mug and hums a silly song. He stands at the edge of my filming set and makes faces behind the camera until I laugh. When I burn my hand on purpose trying to make a new recipe, he is the first to kiss it better. Those are the moments I keep.
"Do you ever regret it?" Sawyer asked once, at night, the kitchen clock ticking.
"Regret what?" I asked.
"Choosing me?"
I put a shrimp on the table and smiled. "Sometimes," I said. Then because the truth was lighter: "No. Not when you peel my shrimp."
At the end of the day, I still have the swing we once loved. I bought another one, smaller, and put it in the new apartment. It is not the same as the one Colin bought, but it swings the same way. When the light bulbs flicker, Sawyer and I sit together and I tell him the story of the first swing. He listens with exaggerated solemnity.
"You made me promise," he says. "You said men would come and go like seasons. But you kept your own weather."
I put my hand on his. "You kept me," I say.
The photograph of the glass bridge rests in my drawer, a folded echo. The velvet box with the ring is at the bottom of a box of old film props. The string lights in the small balcony swing are still warm when the wind blows. That is my ending — small and specific, like a dish carefully seasoned.
"Do you ever think of him?" Sawyer asks sometimes.
"Sometimes," I say.
"Does it hurt?"
"Not the way it used to," I tell him. "Now it is just a photo behind glass, and the sound of a glass cup breaking when a man panics." I laugh and then add, "Mostly I remember how cold the street was when I left."
Sawyer squeezes my fingers. "Then let's keep building warmth."
We do. We cook and film and peel shrimp. We make mistakes and laugh. We fix the swing lights together. Once a year I take the photograph from the drawer and look at it, then tuck it back. It is not a threat. It is proof I survived.
"Ex-husband, keep some decency," I said to Colin once in the corridor of a restaurant.
He had tried. He had failed. He had asked for forgiveness in small drunken sentences. He made a life layered with choices that were not mine to fix. He called my voicemail one last time before I married Sawyer. I listened and I let go.
Sawyer and I made a small ritual the night before our wedding. We sat on the balcony swing under the string lights and ate shrimp. Sawyer peeled them with a proud, flawed care. The dog lay at our feet. The city hummed below.
"I will peel them for you forever," Sawyer said.
"Keep your promise," I said.
He grinned like the boy I first met at the clinic, earnest and imperfect. He kissed me and the light bulbs blinked.
If anyone ever asks what I learned, I cannot sum it up in a neat sentence. I can only hand them a plate with two peeled shrimp and say, "This is how love looked when I decided it was mine."
And sometimes, when the wind blows and the small bulbs blink in the hammock swing, I hear a faint clink, like a glass meeting a floor. It is memory. I do not run.
The End
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