Love I Can No Longer Touch Chapter 08
1 gladly accepted. However, as we turned the corner, we came face to face with Ashley, who had come in for tests of her own.
Her migraines seemed to have worsened considerably. She showed up looking completely worn out.
When she spotted me, a faint glimmer of light flickered to life in her pain-filled eyes.
“Shaun!”
“Oh, you two know each other? Should we all grab lunch together? It’s really just to go over the treatment plan anyway.”
Susan’s hand had been hovering lightly at my back the whole time, a subtle gesture to shield me from being jostled by passersby.
To Ashley, it must have looked like a provocation. She stepped forward and swatted Susan’s hand away before latching onto my arm.
“I’m Shaun’s wife. How is his han-”
I pushed Ashley’s hand off me and took two steps back.
“She isn’t my wife. I barely know her.”
After lunch, we finalized the treatment schedule. Susan had consultations to attend that afternoon, so she only walked me as far as the hospital entrance before heading back inside.
Just as I expected, Ashley was waiting for me there.
The car door was open, and on the passenger seat sat a bouquet of my favorite flowers-cornflowers.
However, I walked right past her and stepped toward the curb to hail a cab.
She caught my hand. Her grip was impossibly gentle, as though I were made of glass that might shatter at the slightest pressure.
“Let me give you a ride home.”
“Why? Is this your way of getting my current home address?”
I smirked at her and ignored the stumble of unspoken words caught in her throat.
“I’ll pass. Ashley, until our divorce is finalized, please contact me only through my lawyer. Otherwise, I’m afraid the court might not grant the petition. After all, you’ve never been one to let go of something that belongs to you, even when you have no use for it whatsoever.”
I kept wounding her with every sentence, driving home the fact that to her, I had never been anything more than a plaything. Her sudden awakening now was nothing but a trick of memory. It was layers upon layers of nostalgia blurring the truth into something unrecognizable.
“Shaun, can we just sit down and talk properly?”
She rarely used that pleading tone with me, not even during the happiest days we’d shared. After all, she was the Weston heiress. She was fiercely independent and unyielding.
Yet, here she stood, humbling herself for my sake, as if she’d throw away every last shred of dignity just to keep
It was staggering to witness.
“But I don’t want to talk to you.”
Ashley put on her wounded expression again, as though I might still be moved by it the way I once was.
“Shaun, I was wrong. I shouldn’t have ignored your calls or assumed you were just throwing a tantrum. Jordan knows he was wrong too. Now stop being so stubborn and come back home with me.”.
I shook my head. “Ashley, listen to yourself. You still think I’m just throwing a tantrum. But you’re wrong. I’m not acting out. Rather, I just don’t love you anymore.”
Her eyes widened slightly. She hadn’t expected me to say something like that in such a breezy tone.
Once I had actually spoken the words “I just don’t love you anymore”, I felt a weight lift off my chest.
Yes. The fundamental reason we had ended up like this was simply that neither of us had realized there was no love left between us. It had taken me months to claw my way out of her indifference and see that truth.
Now, it was my turn to tell her that she had stopped loving me a long time ago.
“And you don’t love me anymore either, so we may as well part ways peacefully.”
A gust of wind swept through, sending the cornflowers on the passenger seat flying in every direction.
While Ashley was distracted by the flowers, frantically trying to salvage the shattered remnants of our love, I hailed a cab and slipped away.
I kept every appointment at the hospital, sticking faithfully to the schedule Susan had laid out for me.
