Chapter 6
"Go to the study and reflect on your behavior," Dante said.
He slammed the bedroom door, yanked out the key, and locked it like he was barricading himself from a thief.
Stella knew exactly what he was doing: trying to force her to bow her head again.
What he didn't know was that he had walked right into her plan.
She had never intended to share a bed with him tonight. All she wanted was to pack her things and get out early.
Besides, the bedroom held nothing worth keeping—just a few old dresses she'd worn for three or four years, washed so often they'd lost their shape.
With a small shake of her head, Stella grabbed her suitcase from the living room corner and walked straight into the study.
The moment she stepped inside, her gaze fell on the gift she'd made for Dante on their seventh anniversary.
It was a handmade string-art portrait, crafted with dozens of skeins of thread and hammered nails, following a guide step by painstaking step.
She had looped the thread around those nails hundreds of thousands of times, staying up late for an entire month to finish it.
The picture she recreated was from their very first date at an amusement park.
Stella still remembered how Dante hadn't even wanted to take that photo.
He'd grown up with too much missing, too much reality weighing on him. To him, amusement parks were scams for kids—silly, embarrassing, a waste of time. He refused over and over.
In the end, she had to take on an entire quarter of Vivienne's workload just to convince him. Only then did he reluctantly agree to one photo.
That day had been their first time at a theme park, and also the last.
So Stella turned that photograph into a string-art portrait, hoping to preserve a little piece of that fleeting sweetness forever.
Every day, without fail, she had checked the tension of the nails, the elasticity of the thread, even custom-ordering a glass frame stuffed with desiccants around the edges so it would last.
She guarded it the same way she tended their relationship. Careful, gentle, terrified to break anything.
Only now did she understand: if a man didn't love one, no amount of careful tending could save a thing.
Stella snapped back to herself, took a breath, lifted the portrait off the wall, and picked up a pair of scissors.
But the moment the thread touched the blade, the tightly woven lines snapped instantly, one after another.
It looked flawless on the surface, but with the slightest touch, they all broke apart.
Perfect on the outside. Broken with a touch. Exactly like the so-called love between her and Dante.
She let out a quiet, bitter laugh and tossed the ruined threads into the trash.
When she started packing the documents on the desk, a loose file folder suddenly slipped open.
Hundreds of handwritten letters spilled across the floor.
One glance. And Stella froze.
They were the love letters she'd written Dante five years ago.
Back then, a nasty seasonal flu was spreading, and Dante caught it hard, so hard he spiked a forty-one-degree fever and was rushed into emergency care.
Hours passed, and the fever wouldn't break. Half-conscious, convinced he was dying, he clung to her hand and begged her to keep reading the love letters she wrote for him.
He said if he died, she should burn them at his grave so he wouldn't be lonely in the afterlife.
To keep him awake for treatment, she agreed through tears. She took pen and paper and wrote down every sweet moment from their years together, reading each one softly into his ear.
By the time Dante's fever finally dropped, Stella had burned through ten gel pens. Her index finger was rubbed raw and bleeding.
Every letter was soaked with her tears… and dotted with flecks of her own blood.
When Dante fully woke up and saw her cramped, twisted hand, he cried, hugged her like he'd never let go, and promised he would love her for life, treat her well forever, never let her get hurt again.
And now? Now he had Vivienne. And he hurt Stella over and over for her.
In the end, he never kept his promise.
Stella inhaled slowly. She didn't take those letters. She threw them into the trash with everything else.
If Dante's promises had expired, keeping these letters only made her sick.
When she finished packing, she glanced at the nearly empty study and her half-empty suitcase, and let out a small laugh.
Dante had always complained about the company's financial strain, urging her to save every penny for their future wedding.