Regret14 min read
He Passed Through My Heart
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I never meant to make anyone a lesson. I only wanted my life back.
"I don't want to see Miles again," I told my friends the night we signed the papers.
They laughed and raised their glasses. "Good. Burn bridges," Emmett said, clapping his hand against mine.
Ten days later, at a private party for friends, I saw him. Of course I did. The circles overlap in this town like two tapes woven too tight. I wasn't drunk that night; I kept my hands to myself and my tone polite.
"Miles," I said when he approached, because manners are habit.
"Therese," he answered. "How have you been?"
"Fine," I said. "Really."
He looked at me like he'd misplaced something he used to rely on. For a second I thought I saw a fracture of regret in his face, then he smoothed it, the way he smoothed every unsaid thing between us.
"Are you alright?" I asked.
"I..." He hesitated. "I have to tell you something."
I had imagined fury, a thousand clever retorts. Instead I listened to the sentence that ended us.
"Let's divorce," he said.
There was a pause full of ordinary things: the music, cutlery, other people's laughter. I kept my face still. "Why?"
"I met someone," he said slowly. "Six years ago...there was a woman. She left me when she was pregnant. The child is five now."
The cup I held slipped and sank into the carpet. The carpet drank the spill like a planner taking notes. "So you want a divorce because she exists?" I asked.
"No. Because—" He swallowed. "Because I met her again, and I feel responsible. I'm sorry."
"I'll have the house," I said. "The other apartment goes to you. Our joint accounts—split. You can leave what you want."
He kept apologizing. He said things that sounded arranged, like a man learning regret from a manual.
"Take your time to tell your family," I said. "Send the papers to your assistant. Leave the keys."
He left. I lay down on the sofa and put my hands over my face until my heart slowed.
We had spoken of Mid-Autumn gifts ten minutes before. I had planned their flavors and who liked which mooncake, and then minutes later a sentence changed our lives.
After the divorce, the world made spectacles of us. "They handled it so well," said some, as if neatness could sterilize betrayal.
"Miles' mother is furious," Marilyn said to me over the phone once. "She called and cried."
"Tell her I agreed," I said flatly. "It's done."
For a while, people asked how I could agree so quickly. I didn't have a good answer. Sometimes decisions are the only thing left that keep you from losing yourself entirely.
He sent the agreement. I signed. I went to the hospital when my body wouldn't stop warning me.
"You need to rest," Rafael said, pressing his palm to my forehead.
"Fine," I told him. "I'll rest."
It was in the hospital garden that I thought of the two pigeons the old myths talked about—the ones that found the center of the world in Delphi. I thought of our honeymoon in Greece, of me getting lost and him coming to find me, breathless and calm, promising, "Don't be afraid. I'm here."
"I thought that was the beginning," I had once said.
"It wasn't," he answers in my memory. His voice was steady. Mine was a small complaint. We are good at carving our memories into soft places and calling them shelter.
Months after the divorce, I sat on the stairs of my small apartment holding an ultrascan printout. I had been unwell, and on a whim I went to the clinic connected to a company our families invested in. I hadn't wanted anyone to know.
"You came here," he said when he found me later, leaning against his car, cigarette dropped at his feet.
"I did," I said. "What do you want, Miles?"
"Do you plan to keep it?" he asked.
"We are divorced," I said.
"Yes." His voice went small. "But if there is a child—" He could not finish.
"That's my choice," I said. "It's not yours."
He looked filthy and tired, like someone stripped overnight of a clean identity. The smoke in the air made the world heavy. For a moment I thought of all the small, ordinary things he had done—finding my tie, making a ridiculous breakfast, carrying me when I fell asleep. They felt antique.
I went to C City alone for the procedure. I lay on the white bed watching the wind haul the ginkgo leaves into the air and drop them like dried coins. I wrapped myself in my thin hospital blanket and tried not to think of the future that was not going to be.
"You don't have to tell anyone," the nurse whispered.
"I won't," I said.
He found me afterwards in the corridor, shaking from the drugs and the cold. He put his hand to his forehead and apologized. I pushed him away with one palm. He leaned on a wall and sagged like a man who had been carrying someone else's guilt for years.
"Leave me," I said.
I left the city two weeks later for Australia to let the world blur. I scrolled through a friend’s feed and saw a photograph that made my chest stop: a wedding invitation, names in spidery script—Miles and Bianca. The image blurred into comments and then was gone. Someone had thought to spare me and then didn't.
"Did he marry his first love?" Emmett asked when I answered a call that night.
"Yes," I said. "He found her. They married."
I thought of the child he had just confessed to me about in our apartment. I thought of the years I had been trying to hold myself upright. I didn't have the energy for anger. I wanted—strangely—to be free.
Three years of marriage and then that divorce. We had learned each other's habits, had folded them into our nights, and when the habit left it felt like a limb amputated cleanly.
There had been tender things. Once, on a rainy morning, he had woke me in my sleep and whispered, "Where's my black suit?" I mumbled and he laughed and kissed my ear. He had built Lego airplanes in a spare apartment; his love for miniature things made him luminous. He would sometimes cook, and his food was sincere. I had flame-colored memories of him—small things that had kept me warm on difficult nights.
We were almost friends. We fit together in the same way two puzzle pieces might settle side by side: mostly steady, mostly reliable, but lacking the spark that matters.
The arrival at an airport months later took everything and turned it into an exhibition. I was waiting for a connection in the VIP lounge, book in hand, when I heard a child's laugh and the smell of sunscreen. I looked up.
"Miles," I whispered before I could stop myself.
His arm held a little boy, hair tussled, laughing at something Bianca did. Bianca was all sun and careful hair, smiling in a way that wanted to be loved.
"Therese," he said, and the sound of my name in his mouth felt like an old window opening.
Bianca asked my name, naive and polite. I told her: "Therese." I kept my voice even and went to the restroom to steady myself.
On the plane I cried silently with an eye mask covering my face. Nobody saw my face as I tried to unmake the life we had constructed.
Later, at a party where our mutual friends lingered in the corners, Miles was a picture of control. He asked, "How are you?"
"Fine," I said and smiled.
He said, "I'm fine, too."
Somewhere in the months after our divorce, I got notice: the agreement had been filed, the certificate placed in a flat in the other city. "Good," I said. "Thank you."
I thought I would be able to breathe. But my body betrayed me with sleepless nights and nausea. I spent afternoons on a bench at the clinic with a paper in my hand, sunlight harsh on my face. I told myself I had been foolish to have expected anything else.
Time does something to a wound—it dulls, it leaves a scar.
After Australia, I returned to life with a private, brittle resolve. I kept my apartment. I kept my work. I kept the practices that kept me steady—cooking, cataloging, arranging the things that belonged to me.
Months later, I saw them at the airport again. This time the child was older, mouth full of new words, and I felt like a trespasser in their domestic geography.
When I saw Bianca up close, I felt a dull recognition of her pain. There are two ways to meet a person who changes your life: with the impulse to destroy or the impulse to survive. I chose survival.
"You and Miles know each other?" a woman asked me once, with the tilt of curiosity that smelt like malice.
"Yes," I said. "We did."
People loved to make up stories. "She must have planned this," someone said, loud enough for me to hear.
I ignored them. That is how we all survive: ignore, move on.
Bianca's life, I learned over time, wasn't the fairytale they said. She married Miles and then the signs of strain came: the jokes at family dinners, the way she tensed when his mother, Marilyn, spoke, the way he sometimes climbed into a car too quickly and shut the door on his wife's eyes. I watched them from a distance with a strange, aching curiosity.
One day something happened that cracked their little glass house. I found out that Miles had never been entirely honest about his past. Not with me. Not with Bianca. Small lies had hardened into large ones: hidden accounts, quiet payments, a file cabinet full of things meant to keep inconvenient people under control. He had been careful, but a man like him cannot hide every human thing.
I did not set out to be anyone’s executioner, but there are moments when the weight of what has been done to you becomes too heavy to carry politely. I began to keep a small, private portfolio: messages, receipts, details of conversations that showed the web of defenses he had constructed. When I read them alone on the couch, my hands trembled.
Once, in a bright room full of donors and glinting crystal, Bianca stood at a podium to speak. It was a charity gala for a children's hospital where Miles had sat on the board once and now avoided, embarrassed by specters of the past.
"He's been generous," she said, voice high with the aspiration of someone trying to be accepted. "He is committed to family."
I stood at the back, hands in my coat, and listened. The program went on. Then someone handed me a glass with a wrong label and I stepped forward.
"Excuse me," I said, into the microphone that immediately attached itself to my voice because the room silenced. "I'd like to correct something."
People turned. Miles looked toward me, confusion and that familiar stalled guilt on his face. Bianca blinked.
"This is not a personal grudge," I continued. "This is a record."
I held up a stack of printed messages, contracts, and bank transfer slips. "I know what discreetly paid silence looks like," I said. "And I know the difference between charity and laundering reputation."
Gasps spread like a ripple. Someone whispered "Scandal." Bianca's cheeks went chalky; the crystal chandeliers above us caught the light and threw it down, making small suns on people's collars.
"You cannot be serious," Bianca whispered, loud enough for those nearest to hear.
"I am very serious," I said. "This is evidence. Miles, do you want to speak?"
He didn't know how. He was a man who polished his face for the public, who practiced remorse into a neat speech. He opened his mouth, closed it, as if he had been learning to say sorry and forgot the words.
"Who else—?" someone shouted.
"Board," Marilyn called from a place at the table, voice like an instruction, not an accusation.
The room became a courtroom of glances. Cameras, first thought to be small flashes of interest, became a net. Phones were leveled. A man recorded. A woman began to cry softly.
Bianca's expression changed like daylight. At first it was horror; then fury; then something like betrayal so total she could not name it. She stepped down from the podium and, with the steadiness of a woman who had learned too many hard things, walked toward Miles.
"Is this true?" she asked.
He could not answer. He dropped his gaze, which is all the admission that anyone needs.
Bianca's reaction moved through modes like weather. She was proud of her child once, proud of the man she had married. As the room swelled with whispers, a small group closed in—friends and curious strangers. Her voice rose and fell.
"How could you?" she said finally. "How did I not know anything?"
"I thought I was protecting you," he said, plaintive and ill-prepared.
"Protecting?" she scoffed. "From truth? From what?"
People murmured. Someone said, "Public relations mess." Somebody else said—mercilessly—"That poor child."
"Don't you dare," Bianca snapped. "Don't you reduce him."
The gathering split into camps. Some reached for the moral high ground. A few, who had forgotten that they had feet of clay, looked suddenly alarmed for what the scandal would mean for their own reputations.
"He's been lying," I said. "To me, to her, to everyone."
The audience, once indulgent, turned their faces away like a school of fish fleeing a net. Bianca grabbed Miles's arm. "You will fix this," she hissed. "You will fix this now."
He tried to move, but the shame clamped him. He had never been a man who wanted the lights; he wanted the illusion. Now the illusion had faltered and something darker showed.
"What will you do?" Marilyn demanded, voice sharp as she rose from her seat and moved to the stage. She had that sense of belonging to the house of consequences.
"I...I'll resign," Miles said, each syllable a crumple of dignity. "I'll resign from the board. I'll pay back—" He looked around at the cameras, the faces. "I'll fix what I can."
A stunned silence followed. People took out phones and began to record. The whispers elongated into near-shouts. The hostess fainted—perhaps from the drama, perhaps from the heat. Someone tried to revive the dignity of the evening with a joke; it landed like a pebble.
Bianca's gestures had become a storm. At first she had defended him; now she was the accused's true champion who had been betrayed. But the room didn't see that nuance. They saw a woman in the middle of a collapse, holding to a man whose hands were not clean.
"He will take responsibility," she said through clenched teeth.
"Will you stay?" a voice asked.
Bianca's chest heaved. "I—" She looked at Miles like she was seeing him as another person entirely. Then she straightened, and something like pity or resolve settled in her features. She turned to the crowd and barked, with the brittle authority of someone who had been hurt too long: "Please give us space."
That moment, while not a physical punishment, was a public unmasking. It was two people stripped of the polished image they had curated. People left crumbs of sympathy and the rest of the table ached with the sweet sensation of watching someone fall from a small grace. Bianca's face crumpled in a way that made my knees weaken; it was not satisfaction I felt, but the terrible consequence of being human and small and liable to error.
It was only the first of two reckonings.
Months later, after the initial scandal, Miles's image—built of timelines and tidy narratives—began to fracture at the edges in a way that could not be patched. His resignation had been the start. At another charity event, the board read statements and distanced themselves. The press circled. Contracts were re-examined. Miles's company restructured his role. The world, which had loved him for his control, now saw him as someone who had controlled things for the wrong reasons.
Bianca and Miles divorced not long after.
When a person like him falls, people like to throw stones. But there is no joy in watching a man who used to be confident become unmoored. There is only the sober observation that choices have prices.
After the public unmasking at the gala, there was a very different punishment. This one was not about the public image; it was about the people who had enabled his omissions.
At a shareholders' meeting held in a glass-walled room, Miles stood to answer a question about fiduciary responsibility. Cameras were present; journalists were hungry. "How did this happen?" they asked.
He tried to explain. He said words like "mistake," "regret," "oversight." Board members who had once nodded at him now slid their plates to the other side.
"Mr. Ashford," said one of them—Carter Coffey—cold as an operating room. "You used company funds in ways that weren't disclosed. You directed transfers through shell accounts. You used private assets to buy silence."
"Those were personal payments," Miles argued. "They were meant to protect privacy."
"Personal payments using company cards?" the board member said. "Do you realize what that means to investors?"
Bianca sat in the back with Finnian on her lap, and the child, innocent of all this storm, played with a rubber ball. Finnian looked up at his mother, eyes full of the uncomplicated trust of the very young. Bianca's hand tightened on his shoulder.
The shareholders demanded an audit. An audit revealed further obfuscation. Legal counsel advised restraint. Public relations advised contrition.
Finally, in a meeting that would be quoted for months in business columns, a motion was put: remove Miles from every executive role. The vote was unanimous.
"Thirty seconds," said the chairman when the call went to votes.
The moment the gavel struck, it sounded to me like a metronome for consequences. Miles's face moved through stages—shock, denial, attempts at rationalization, then collapse. He stood in the glass room, a man who had kept everything tidy now having to listen to his own stewardship called into question.
Bianca walked out with Finnian, shoulders squared. She had already learned to live with stares. Now she walked out with her child in her arms and a look on her face that was not victory but a kind of defiant survival.
That scene—the removal, the boardroom, the cameras—was not vengeance. It was a legal and public stripping of the shells that had protected him. He had to stand and watch as his position, which had been both armor and identity, was removed.
After the boardroom, people talked about "karma." Some said the world had finally balanced the scales. Others said a brilliant man had been reduced because he believed secrets could be bought. Bianca, now single again, filed for custody and then, as stories shifted, for space to raise their son. Miles tried to make amends; what help that offered was small.
When he came to me months later, hands trembling, asking how to make it right, I did not know if he wanted absolution or punishment. "How can I ever make this right?" he asked in the small-lit kitchen of the apartment I had not wanted him to enter again.
"I won't give you absolution," I said. "But I will tell you what you need to do."
"Tell me."
"Stop hiding," I said. "Be honest to anyone who asks. Tell Bianca the whole truth. Tell Finnian, someday, the truth that is age-appropriate. Pay what's due. Don't look for clean returns. Work quietly for them."
He nodded. He thought that repairing a life was a set of transactions. He didn't yet understand that it is mostly time and humility.
Months—and then years—took their work. Miles moved from public disgrace into the quiet business of being a person who owed amends. He did not find a public redemptive moment. He found small ones: visits to charities without photographers, a letter to the board with verified repayments, a claim in court where he accepted responsibility. Bianca raised Finnian with a dedication that made her stronger in ways that no one had acknowledged when she was the target of sneers. She found her voice at parent-teacher nights, at the grocery store, in the quiet of nights where she checked homework and watered a small lemon tree on her balcony.
"Do you ever think about what we could have had?" he asked me on the phone once.
"We had things," I said. "We had routines that were warm. But that is not always the same as love."
He was surprised that I did not narrate a romance. "But—"
"Sometimes the thing that is missing is not magnificent fireworks," I told him. "It's the choice to be small and consistent with another person."
I forgave slowly, as if forgiveness were a muscle I had to flex. I forgave because I needed space away from the weight of hatred that would have made me smaller. I forgave because anger, in the end, had no yield I could plant my feet upon.
Later, in another private life, I met a man who did not come with a ledger. We disagreed. We laughed. He bought me strange little gifts that made no sense—but the meaning was in the trying, not in their value. He made no promises he could not keep. He taught me the small delights of being seen.
Bianca and Miles, each in their different ways, bore the result of their choices. There was public humiliation and professional penalty. There were also private reckonings that cannot be televised: lonely nights, gentle apologies, and the day-to-day work of being decent.
One evening years on, at a small community dinner I attended to support a neighborhood kitchen, I saw Miles across the room with a tray of bread. He looked older and less confident, but better in the way that bruised things can look better once they stop pretending to be whole.
"Therese," he said across the low music. "How are you?"
"I'm well," I said. "Thank you."
He smiled and turned away. I watched him move through the room like someone who had raw edges flow into skin. I had done my part—when I stepped into that polished hall and lifted evidence into the light, I had not wanted blood. I had wanted truth. The rest had been consequences.
"Do you regret it?" a friend asked me later that night as we walked through the quiet streets.
"Some things are like small winter fires," I said. "You need them to keep warm, but you must be careful where you hold the flame."
He nodded, satisfied perhaps with this metaphor, and in the distance the ginkgo leaves rattled like dry coins.
Years later, when I think back to that moment in the hospital garden and the sound of the ginkgo leaves, I realize what I wanted most: not to punish, not to humiliate for sport, but to reclaim the center of my own world. I wanted to decide what belonged to me.
If there is a moral in this, it is not about the fall. It is about what follows. People will be found out. People will be hurt. But there is always the possibility to rebuild with clearer hands.
"I will live," I tell myself sometimes, when the nights are cold and the city is indifferent. "I will live anyway."
And I do.
The End
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