The days after Ben left were difficult in ways Andy hadn't anticipated.
He had expected sadness. He had expected loneliness. He had even expected the occasional
urge to call Ben, although he had hoped he would be able to resist it.
What he hadn't expected was how many ordinary things would remind him that he was no
longer married.
The second coffee mug.
The empty side of the bed.
The restaurant they used to visit when they wanted to celebrate something, or when they
wanted to pretend that ordering dinner somewhere nice could repair whatever had gone wrong
during the week.
It was astonishing how many places could become attached to a person.
You could go years without noticing the significance of a particular table, a particular street, a
particular corner of a room. Then someone left your life, and suddenly the entire world seemed
to have been designed to remind you of them.
Andy found himself thinking about the restaurant.
It had been their usual date place long before they were married. They had gone there on one
of their early dates, when they were still getting to know each other and every conversation felt
like an opportunity to discover something new.
They had returned over the years. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Ordinary evenings when neither of
them wanted to cook.
It was a Thai restaurant, warm and familiar, with a menu they both knew well enough that they
rarely needed to study it.
Andy remembered sitting across from Ben at that table and thinking that this was what a life
together looked like.
Not grand gestures. Not declarations made under a sky full of stars. Just dinner, conversation,
and the comforting knowledge that you had someone to go home with afterward.
Perhaps that was why Andy had suggested meeting there one more time.He wasn't foolish enough to believe that dinner would fix everything. He knew that one evening
could not erase what had happened, that an apology would not magically restore trust, that love
alone was not a substitute for accountability.
He wasn't asking for a miracle.
He was asking Ben to show up.
Sometimes, that was the hardest thing to ask of another person.