He Kept Postponing Our Marriage for Her Crises… So I Ended It Myself Chapter 17
After that, he moved through the days like a man already dead.
The Brooks family came for Chloe. He let them take her.
By then, Chloe’s act had become her reality. She sat in a wheelchair, drool running down her chin,
eyes fixed on empty space.
She mumbled his name over and over.
But the sounds barely made it into words, slurring into senseless syllables.
This time, it was real.
Julian looked at her and felt nothing but revulsion.
Not at Chloe. At himself.
He had destroyed the person he loved most, with his own hands, for this.
He kept looking for Audrey.
After three years, he stopped.
He sought refuge at Mount Hope Monastery on the outskirts of Baycrest.
The abbot asked him, “Why have you come?”
“To pray for someone.”
“And what are you praying for?”
“That she’s alive. That she’s safe. That she never meets anyone like me again.”
He didn’t pray for forgiveness.
He knew he didn’t deserve it.
When they shaved his head, he caught his reflection in the glass aunt, cheekbones sharp under the skin, temples already dusted with white.
He was thirty-two.
For years after, his life stayed the same. Sweeping the courtyards at dawn. Tending the grounds in
the afternoon. Tolling the vesper bells at dusk.
When visitors came to light candles, he kept his head bowed and his hands folded. He never looked
His world shrank to the walls of the monastery, and he let it.
There was only God, scripture, and the wound in his chest that never closed.
A decade bled away. Then, one spring morning, a group of visitors came to the monastery.
He was sweeping the stone path in front of the chapel when he heard footsteps and looked up.
The man walking at the front was Nathaniel, the Brooks heir, the one the Baycrest rumor mill had sworn was gay. The one who’d never wanted Chloe.
He wore a dark overcoat. He looked good, composed and at ease.
He was holding the hand of a little girl, four or five years old.
The little girl bounced along beside him, calling over her shoulder, “Mommy, hurry up!”
A woman stepped out of the car behind them. She bent down, scooped the little girl up, and smiled.
“Slow down, baby. You’re gonna trip.”
He would’ve known that smile anywhere. Even in his sleep.
It was her.
The woman he’d given up everything to forget, and never could.
She was thinner than he remembered, but her skin glowed. Her eyes were bright.
She carried the girl over to Nathaniel. He took the child from her arms effortlessly, the way people do when love has turned into muscle memory, and leaned down to murmur something in her ear. She smiled and gave him a playful shove.
The broom trembled in Julian’s hands.
He stepped back behind a cloister pillar and couldn’t move.
The footsteps came closer.
He heard the little girl’s voice. “Daddy, there’s a man here.”
He didn’t dare look up.
Nathaniel’s voice came, even and measured, like it was meant only for him. “Brother, got a light?”
Julian looked up. Their eyes met.
There was no surprise in Nathaniel’s eyes. No curiosity. Just the quiet certainty of a man who already knew.
“Here.” He kept his head low, drew a lighter from the deep pocket of his habit, and held it out.
Nathaniel took it, lit a cigarette, and exhaled slowly.
He didn’t leave. He leaned against the pillar like he had all the time in the world. “How long have you been here, Brother?”
“I’ve lost count.”
“Lost count.” Nathaniel let the words sit there, then smiled. “Then you probably don’t know. About ten years ago, I found a woman not far from these gates.”
“Covered in blood. She’d crawled out of a drainage ditch and collapsed at my front gate.”
Julian stopped breathing.
“My estate is right at the foot of this mountain.” Nathaniel nodded toward the east. “I bought it there on purpose because I knew the woman I loved had moved into the villa nearby. I just wanted to be close to her. Funny how things work out, isn’t it?”
His gaze dropped to Julian’s white-knuckled grip on the broom handle. His voice went very quiet. “I just didn’t expect that before she ever got to move in, she’d come crawling to my door half-dead.”
Nathaniel paused. Looked at him.
“Before she lost consciousness, the name she kept saying was yours.”
Julian’s vision blurred.
“I got her to a hospital. She lost the baby. She almost didn’t make it.”
Nathaniel crushed the cigarette out against the stone. “As you can see, she’s doing just fine now.”
Nathaniel glanced back toward Audrey.
Then he walked away, grinning. “Lily, give your mother a break!”
Julian didn’t move.
He watched the three of them walk out through the monastery gate.
The little girl sat on Nathaniel’s shoulders. Audrey walked beside them, one hand hovering near the child, laughing so hard her eyes squeezed shut.
He kept hearing what Nathaniel had told him. Ten years ago, bleeding out and barely conscious,
Audrey had called his name.
Not “help.” Not “someone.” His name.
And when she called for him, he was upstairs with another woman.
Julian didn’t make a sound.
He knelt in the empty chapel, prostrating himself on the cold stone floor. His forehead pressed flat against the freezing stone, his body shaking.
God.
Keep her safe.
Let her forget me.
Never let her meet another man like me.
The candles on the altar burned down to stubs. Ash gathered on the stone around him. He never
lifted his head.
