A new email. It was William Larson.
He had been waiting for me abroad for so long. Even after we had officially separated, he never stopped reaching out. Every week, without fail, he sent me an email.
And now, just as he had always done, he had written again. I took a deep breath, wiped my tears, and pulled myself together. Then, I opened the email.
Clipped inside was a blurry picture of a black hole.
[Another collapsed star was observed today, Karen. How have you been? I miss you.]
[After I retire, so I don’t turn into a sad black hole, I’ll definitely come back home to watch over you.]
[It’s just that it’s still too far away. My heart breaks thinking about you.]
William grew up in a foreign country, always mixing in that dry, foreign sense of humor. Over the past five years, the files he sent me have piled up into a mountain, filling my entire inbox. The pictures he took of me, the words of love he wrote—I backed them up separately, afraid that one day they might disappear. But I never replied. For so long, it had been his one-man show.
Because unlike Ferry, I knew that I had married a man, and I had my own sense of propriety. I always thought that, given time, William would eventually let go of me. But he never did.
I sat there quietly, scrolling through the letters from the past. Memories flooded my heart, and for a second, two little voices argued inside me. Then my phone beeped. Ferry had transferred ten million dollars to my account with a message.
[This is my fault. Consider this my compensation.]
But no amount of money could erase my hatred. And at that moment, I finally realized—my life was mine to live. Not for him, not for my family. For myself.
A rush of excitement coursed through me as I typed out my reply to William’s email.
[It’s not far. Wait for me for a month, and I’ll come to you.]
After that fight with Ferry, we silently agreed to sleep in separate rooms. I stayed in the master bedroom; he moved into the second bedroom. But every night when I got up, I would see the door to the second bedroom wide open—empty.
He was probably at Chindy’s house. But I no longer cared where he spent his nights. I packed up my belongings little by little, sending them overseas where William would receive them. Each box I shipped off felt like a piece of myself leaving behind the weight of my past.