He Humiliated Me in Public, So His Regret Pays by the Tear novel · Chapter 8 of 32

Chapter 8: What He Signed

Dominik's POV

The house was quiet in a way it had never been quiet when she lived in it.

Halina hummed.

I had not known that until I stopped hearing it.

She hummed over the stove and in the shower.

She hummed while she read the back of a flour bag, three notes and then three more, tuneless and steady.

For seven years I had thought of it as the sound of the house working.

On Monday night I stood in the kitchen at ten o'clock with a glass of water.

I listened to the refrigerator, and it was the loudest thing I had ever heard.

Her coat hook by the door was empty.

I had looked at it so many times in a month that the wall had begun to feel like a verdict.

I put my phone on the island and picked it up and put it down again.

On Thursday I had stood at the head of a table full of people with money and chosen to say nothing.

I had told myself it was because the truth was complicated.

It was not complicated.

It was seven words long.

The woman I had been married to for seven years had walked in with a tart and said the whole sentence without raising her voice.

I had stood there and let the investor's chair scrape.

I am a coward.

I had known it about myself for a long time and had managed it the way you manage a bad knee.

I picked up the phone and called the investor.

She answered on the fourth ring.

"Dominik."

"I have to tell you something, and then you can hang up."

"I have no plans to hang up," she said. "I'm in the bath."

"My wife wrote the dessert menu. Every item. She wrote it at our kitchen table before there was a restaurant, and she's been developing every recipe at Kral since the first day, and I let Lena put her name on the program for the same reason I let a lot of things happen. It was easier. It made me look like I had a team."

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