You let the silence stretch long enough to make him feel it.
Then, quietly, “She told me enough.”
He closes his eyes.
For just a second.
When he opens them, the corridor between you feels even longer than it is.
“I never told the board she was my wife,” he says.
“Congratulations on not committing that particular lie.”
His mouth tightens.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
He takes a breath. “I was lonely. The divorce was dragging. She was… uncomplicated.”
That actually makes you laugh.
Not warmly.
Uncomplicated.
A girl nearly twenty years younger who liked expensive weekends, flirted with a title, and played house with a man still legally married to a woman who knew where all his structural weaknesses lived. Yes. Very uncomplicated.
“You have a gift,” you say, “for describing your worst choices like they were management inconveniences.”
That hurts him.
Good again.
Because loneliness is real. Separation is brutal. The long slow death of marriage rearranges people in ugly ways. You know that. You lived it too. But loneliness does not explain every act that follows. Some things are not symptoms. They are character under pressure.
