Sweet Romance11 min read
He Was a Quiet Breeze
ButterPicks13 views
I married Silas Everett because both our parents decided it for us.
My mother, Margaret Torres, spent half a year arranging, pushing, and finally bribing the last loose end away so I would accept. She handed me a ring as if she were closing a deal.
"Are you sure this is what you want?" the clerk at the registry asked us, looking between us like she was solving a puzzle.
"I marry who I want," I said, arms folded, voice flat.
Silas pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and smiled, quiet and even. "I marry whoever I marry."
We were two lines forced under the same roof, neither expecting to cross.
Then things began to tangle. In small ways. In soft, unplanned moments.
"Sit closer," the photographer said on the registry steps, and Silas leaned in like it was the easiest thing in the world.
I had meant to keep every piece of me at a polite distance. Instead, when he reached and steadied my head against his shoulder, I learned a new way a person could be steady.
"Just this way," he said to the photographer with a calm his students must hear every semester.
"Thank you," I muttered because I couldn't take my eyes off the way his jaw relaxed when he smiled.
Two days later we stepped into our new life and a thousand small items of domestic absurdity: a giant orange cat named Iron, an overstuffed bear I didn't want, and a living room that suddenly felt like someone else had already lived in me.
"Victoria," Silas said once, handing me a boxed present while I scrolled my phone. "There's a small gift in the trunk for your uncle and aunt. You can take it."
"You're considerate," I snapped without thinking.
He smiled as if my barbs were soft jokes. "It's the least I can do."
I had come to the first meeting with him wearing a black studded jacket and a smoky eye. Margaret had insisted on a meet-and-greet; she had wanted "a sensible match." But when I pushed my chair close to his mother and kissed her cheek in front of everyone—because of course I had—Silas only sat, sipping tea, looking as if I had amused him.
"You look... dazzling," his mother, Katharine Calhoun, said and patted my hand. "So lively."
I was waiting for the gasp, the tut, the admonition. Instead, Katharine clasped my fingers like she had never had a daughter and smiled in a way that made my chest clench with something confusingly like belonging.
"You're not an easy one," Margaret had sighed to me later.
"Because I can be," I told her.
"Good," she said, satisfied. "Learn how to keep them off balance."
We waited out the newness like a pair of people trying on clothes that did not quite fit.
"Are you afraid of the dark?" Silas asked once in a movie theater, voice soft enough that the crowd's screams and the flicker of the screen felt like background.
"Scared of boredom," I answered.
He shrugged and draped his jacket over my legs when I fell asleep. When I woke, his jacket was covering my knees and his profile was a calm line in the dark.
"That jacket was itchy," he murmured. "You shouldn't wear studs to movies."
"I'm not a princess," I said. "I don't sleep on cushions."
"You sleep exactly like a feral t-rex," he corrected.
"You're not supposed to be funny," I told him. He didn't stop being funny.
The apartment slowly filled with evidence of his ordinary heroism. He labeled the spice jars. He left a list on the table: "Replace curtains, buy softer mattress, consider navy set for his side." He cared for the cat with the kind of tenderness that made me feel like a trespasser in the best of ways.
"Eat properly," he said more than once, passing me a bowl he had cooked after I had proclaimed I wanted "meat and noodles" and then spat the first bite out for drama. "You overdo it."
"You're impossible," I said, but when he pressed the bowl back toward me with a patient expression, I swallowed, really swallowed.
"You're my wife," he said once in the kitchen. "We share food."
We made rules without intending to: he did laundry, I rearranged cushions, he signed my university sponsor checks with a calm, careful hand, and I tested the boundaries of his patience in absurd, performative ways.
"You're too chatty with my students," he teased one afternoon when I plopped down next to him while he was grading.
"They're cute," I said, running a finger along the edge of a graded paper. "And you are, too."
Silas's laugh was the sort that made my heart stumble because he never laughed that loudly for anyone else. "Please don't call me cute in front of them. I'll lose office respect."
"You try."
I found myself learning the language of his small mercies. He untied knots I pretended not to notice, he took gifts to my relatives, he always, patiently, chose to be gentle.
"You're being soft on me," I accused the night he washed and folded my pajamas.
"Someone has to be," he said.
There was a past I kept like a half-burned letter in my pocket. An ex — Wade Gonzales — who had once left me with nothing but a paltry apology and a bank statement. The idea of trusting anyone else after Wade, after my father Benito Barbieri had left my mother for a woman everyone called "young and glamorous" and stole the security from her hands, made most of my chores into armor.
"You really don't have to fix everything with money," Silas told me once, marking a passage in a book.
"I'm not fixing things with money," I said. "I'm investing."
"That's not the same thing," he said, and his patience had edges now.
Later, in a hotel room that smelled faintly of cheap soap and last night's leftover perfume, I replayed a night I could not remember fully. We had argued. I had been drunk on people and places and things that hurt me. I woke with the bitter copper taste of humiliation and the shape of my own bad choices. Under the sheets, in the pale light, I found proof of what I'd done: his shirt folded so carefully, his face turned away, a chill in the air like a warning.
Silas woke to me packing.
"Why are you leaving?" he said quietly, stunned awake.
"I'm going on a trip," I lied. "Business."
"You didn't just... pack without a word."
"I didn't want you to ask," I said. "You can read into that, if you like."
He didn’t lecture me. He didn't summon fury. He simply looked at me with a hurt that took my breath.
That was when guilt became a living thing. I called Tatum Legrand, my assistant, and said, "Book me a flight now. Anywhere but here."
"Boss," he said, with that shocked, loyal undertone, "Are you sure?"
"I'm certain," I lied again.
I left like a thief, a coward wrapped in a heroic story. I told myself I needed time. I told myself I'd untangle the mess I'd made.
Meanwhile Wade Gonzales reappeared like a bad aftertaste. He wasn't interested in me anymore, no — he had stepped back into life with a new air of success and the same old hunger. He sat down across from me in a glass restaurant and smiled with the same careless cruelty.
"Wade," I said, cool. "You look... settled."
"My father is sick," he said. "I had to take care of family things. I didn't want to drag you down."
"You walked away with money," I reminded him. "You still look clean in a suit."
He looked at his glass. "Things change."
They do. I knew that. I also knew that I hated being the person who let him rewrite the past. I meant to be witty, to say he owed me, to make him feel the smallness he had made me feel.
At my wedding reception, something happened I hadn't planned. I had invited Wade to the wedding out of some old compulsion to watch him watch me — like a game where the old player gets to see who won. I didn't mean to rouse the crowd into attention, but Margaret had a flare for drama.
"Wade came with a new girlfriend," I said aloud, not sure why my throat had burned when I said her name.
"Let her come," Wade said smoothly. "I'm not here for sparring, Victoria."
"You're always here to take," I said.
That night, in front of our gathered crowd, I did something I had rehearsed in a thousand private ways, and then some. I took the microphone from the wedding host and spoke, not as a rich, defended woman, but as someone who had been done wrong.
"Everyone here," I said, "knows about my family, knows what was stolen, and... knows who left."
There was a ripple.
"Wade Gonzales," I said, aiming through the noise, "you were part of what took me and my family to the bottom. You took money as if we owed you a favor."
The room went still, the sort of still where forks hover mid-air. Wade's face, which had always been smooth, shifted. He opened his mouth. People nudged their chairs closer to the aisles, hungry for a story. I had their attention.
"You're wrong," Wade said fast. "I never—"
"Stop," I said. "Tell everyone how you took the five hundred thousand from my mother in her weakest hour. Tell them how you promised me you'd help, and then you left with what should have been help from sincere hands."
Wade's color left him. "I didn't—"
"But you did," I insisted. I reached into my bag and pulled out a folded paper — a bank record, a message thread that showed a transaction, a cool line that said 'Transfer complete.' I handed the phone over to the wedding planner and let the public see.
The sound in the hall changed; it was a mixture of gasps and palms slapping knees and someone quietly cursing.
"Wade," I said softly, turning my face so my voice broke into the hush, "did you ever think what it would be like to live under the roof of what you took? Did you sleep at night?"
Cameras came out. Someone started recording. A dozen people leaned forward, eyes bright. Wade's girlfriend stood like a piece of new porcelain, eyes wide, stumbling toward him.
"This is outrageous," Wade tried. "Victoria, that's private."
"It's public now," I said. "It was public when you emptied accounts and left."
He smirked at first — the same smirk that had once held me like bait. Then it cracked. His friends shifted uncomfortably. I could see it in the way his shoulders slumped and the way his cheeks flushed hot with shame. Someone in the crowd whispered the words "charity fraud."
"You took advantage of my mother's vulnerability," I said, not forgetting the man who had taught me that cruelty could wear a charming face. "You used her like a stepping stone then left."
There was a faint sound near the back of the hall, like people exhaling in unison. I watched Wade's neighbor recoil as a cousin of mine stepped forward.
"You're using the money for your luxury car and your apartment?" my cousin asked. "That's neat."
Wade flailed. "That's not—"
"Do you want the proof?" I asked. "Because I can keep going."
He looked like a man who had run out of stories.
His phone vibrated; his father — Ben, a man with a public image and private sins — texted him and received the barrage of the crowd's attention. Mendacity has a way of being contagious; when one man slips, some of his associations seem to crack too.
My mother stood at my side with a little smile and a fist in her pocket. She had taught me how to bait; she also taught me to finish what I started.
Wade's reaction changed like the weather. He had been composed, then shocked, then defensive, then finally collapsing into pleas.
"Victoria, please," he said, voice raw. "I didn't mean—"
"Beg them," I said, pointing to the crowd. "Beg your new friends to tell the truth."
He began to babble apologies. The bride's uncle started to clap slowly and loudly to drown him out, and the crowd took up the rhythm.
People's reactions varied: a few hissed, a few took video, some applauded, a few went silent in sympathy for him, but not enough.
Wade's face crumpled; he tried to collect himself, to deny further. His girlfriend, finally, stepped back from him and did what people do when the mask drops: she vanished, slipping out into the night.
The man who had once used my heart as collateral for cash, who had thought himself clever enough to walk away from a burning house with a pocket full of change, was left with his pride in tatters in a room that had watched him burn.
It wasn't law that took him down. It was the public, the gaze of the people he'd underestimated. Their verdict was swift, unsentimental, and delivered with cellphones raised like witnesses.
"Please," he begged. "Please—"
But begging in front of a hundred faces is not the same as the quiet ask of a man redeemed.
He stood, hunched, lost. People pointed. Someone filmed his trembling hands. A friend covered his face with a hand, as if to hide the man they had believed in. The friend stepped back.
There was a long, terrible silence, and then applause. It wasn't for Wade. It was for the courage of the woman who had called out lies. The applause felt like warmth against my arms.
Later, when the videos hit social feeds, the tone could be cruel, but public shame is a kind of truth. Wade's voice turned small in interviews. His attempts to explain were mocked. He found there was no hugging back the respect he'd thrown away.
That night, after everything, I walked back to the side where Silas had stood all evening, hands clasped, his expression peaceful with a deep, private kind of fury.
"Did you see?" I asked him.
"I saw," he said. "How difficult was it?"
"Difficult wasn't the word," I said. "It felt... necessary."
He reached for my hand. "Thank you," he said with the quiet I had learned to trust. "For telling the truth."
The wedding was supposed to be a declaration of union. Somehow, it became a courtroom where people saw the truth and chose a side.
Wade's punishment continued in subtle, public ways. At his office, colleagues pretended ignorance. Invitations stopped arriving. His girlfriend left his side when she realized there were pages of receipts and messages, and he could no longer talk his way out of them. People who had admired him walked differently around him, leaving a space the size of shame.
But Wade was only the first kind of bad. There was a longer, older cruelty: my father, Benito Barbieri. People like him pride themselves on being admired. They think status and charm can hide everything.
At a professor's gala where Benito made his usual speech about legacy, I arranged a small surprise. I walked up to him in front of the gathered faculty and donors, and I told, calmly and plainly, the story of my mother's bruises, of the couch in my grandmother's house, of a girl who grew up learning to survive by watching others fail to choose right.
The room grew cold and then hot with the shock. Donors shuffled feet. Benito's smile stayed fixed for a heartbeat longer than seemed natural, then it snapped.
"You can't do this," he said. "This is slander."
"No," I said. "This is the truth. This is you."
He sputtered, anger flaring, then fear. Those who had once laughed with him narrowed their eyes. An old colleague who had been complicit in a rumor or two stood with arm crossed and did not speak for him.
The result was different: not the dramatic collapse of Wade, but a quiet dismantling. My father found himself uninvited to events. His name lost its polish. He sat over the next weeks at lunch tables where people pretended not to know him. The world didn't burn him alive like a mob; it simply turned its face elsewhere, and that quiet, searing invisibility can be worse.
"Do you regret it?" Silas asked later, holding my hand as the press buzzed around us like nervous bees.
"No," I said. "I regret lying to myself for so long."
We had come together under obligation; we'd turned that obligation into something else. A slow, tender repair took place in small domesticities: Silas made sure my favorite bowl was always clean. I stopped using money as a sword and began to let it be a tool with soft edges.
"Do you love me?" I asked him one late night when the city was a scatter of lights below us.
He looked at me, close enough that I could see the tiny imperfection near his left eye, the sort of thing you notice only when you adore someone.
"Yes," he said softly. "I do."
"Say it properly," I teased.
He smiled, breath warm with the scent of laundry and late tea. "I love you, Victoria. Not because of the ceremony, not because of the drama, but because you reach for things like you're trying to hold a storm — dangerous, messy — and you still try to keep what matters safe."
"That's a very domestic way to confess," I said.
He kissed me, steady and slow, like someone placing a bandage over a wound that would need time. "Then I will be domestic," he said.
Life after the storm was ordinary in a way saturated with choice. We argued, we reconciled, we pretended not to notice the cat asleep on our books. I learned to make small apologies. He learned to laugh louder in private.
At a small ceremony held later — an intimate, homey echo of the bigger day — Iron marched down the short aisle with our rings tied to his collar. I had sent fifty bags of sweets to the school gate, a tiny reparation for the high gate they had once kept me from.
We stood in front of a small group, including a man who seemed humbled and one who had been humbled publicly. The world had shifted; people had been seen for what they were.
"Do you promise," Silas whispered, eyes bright.
"I promise," I said, and it felt sincere.
When we walked back down that short aisle, the day felt quieter, gentler. We weren't perfect, but we were honest.
Later, as I slid into bed with my head on his shoulder, I thought about how strange fidelity can be: not only to another person, but to your own promise to be better.
"Did you think I would ever change?" I asked into the dark.
"You've been changing all along," he said, fingers tracing a map on my arm. "Like a breeze that finally finds a place to rest."
I fell asleep to the sound of his peaceful breathing, a rhythm that had once been foreign to me but was now the only background I wanted.
The End
— Thank you for reading —