Eight Years Of Shredding Her Lies Chapter 1

I’ve shredded seven of Elena’s passports.

Every time she booked a flight to Vancouver, I would find the blue booklet the night before and feed it into the cross-cut shredder in my home office. Seven years. Seven expedited replacements.

On the eighth time, she just sat there on the velvet sofa, watching me grip the shears. She didn’t move. She didn’t scream. She just looked at me with a hollow, terrifying pity and said, "You know why I have to go."

Of course, I knew. Her "One Who Got Away" was in Vancouver. Oliver.

Eight years ago, I used a pregnancy and a family-backed ultimatum to chase him out of the country and pull her to the altar. For eight years, she hadn't touched me. Not once. She cared for our daughter, she paid her share of the bills, she showed up to the PTA meetings like a ghost in a Dior suit. But between us lay the vast, freezing expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

She spent every waking hour of her PTO dreaming of those two weeks in British Columbia. And I spent every year playing the villain, destroying her documents just to keep her grounded in a house that wasn't a home. I thought I was winning. I thought if I kept her here long enough, the ghost of Oliver would eventually starve.

But on the eighth year, she stopped fighting. She didn’t go to the post office for a new photo. She didn’t call the embassy. I thought I had finally broken her spirit—until I opened her iPad.

There was a photo. My daughter, Lily, was sitting on a man’s lap, laughing at a zoo I didn’t recognize. It wasn't just her. My father was in the next photo, sharing a scotch with the same man. Then a selfie of my best friend, Jordan, clinking beer mugs with him at a rooftop bar I frequented.

The earliest timestamp was from five years ago.

Oliver wasn't in Vancouver. He had been back for half a decade. Everyone knew. My family, my friends, my own child. The only person living in the dark was the man who thought he was the jailer.

I hadn't trapped her at all. She didn’t need to fly anywhere because her "Vancouver" had moved right under my nose.

I closed the iPad and booked a one-way ticket to Vancouver for myself. He wasn't there anymore, but I needed to see the place I had spent eight years hating.

...

"Are you having another one of your episodes?"

Elena’s voice drifted from the hallway, dripping with the usual cocktail of exhaustion and contempt. She was drying her hair, her eyes falling on the iPad I had just flipped face-down on the coffee table.

I looked up at her. After eight years, that sharp, aristocratic face still had the power to make my heart skip, but for the first time, it was a skip of fear, not love. She was a stranger who happened to know my social security number.

"You’re not going to Vancouver this year, are you?" I asked. My voice was eerily steady.

Elena stopped rubbing her hair. She tossed the towel onto the armchair and looked down at me, a flicker of mockery in her cold eyes.

"Miles, you’ve played this game for eight years. Aren't you bored yet?" She walked to the kitchen island and poured a glass of iced water. "You shred my passports because you want to see me crawl. You want to feel like you still own me. Well, I'm not replacing it this year. You got what you wanted. Why do you look like the victim?"

She spoke to me like I was a hysterical child. I watched her throat move as she drank, and a wave of nausea hit me. He’d been back for five years. He’d been playing house with my daughter while I was busy hunting for scissors.

"Elena," I said, my voice cracking. "For eight years, you watched me go crazy. You watched me throw those blue scraps in your face, screaming like a madman. Was it funny? Knowing he was only three miles away while I was losing my mind over a flight to Canada?"

Elena’s hand tightened on the glass. Her brow furrowed—a tiny crack in the porcelain mask. She wasn't used to this tone. Usually, this was the part where I started breaking things or weeping for an ounce of her affection.

"Are you trying to pick a fight?" She set the glass down hard. "I have a board meeting tomorrow. I don’t have the bandwidth for your insecurities. If you’re upset that I’m staying home to 'neglect' you, find a therapist."

She turned to go to her study, but paused by the nursery door. Our six-year-old, Lily, pushed the door open, clutching a high-end Lego Technic set. When she saw me, she instinctively ducked behind Elena’s leg.

"Mommy? Is Daddy yelling at you again?"

The innocence in her voice was a serrated blade. I stood up, reaching out a hand. "Lily, honey, come here. Daddy isn't yelling."

Lily didn’t budge. She gripped Elena’s slacks, her eyes full of a defensive, learned guardedness. "I don’t want to. You’re always mean to Mommy. You’re not nice like Uncle Oliver."

The air in the room turned to lead.

I saw Elena’s face go ashen. She immediately clamped a hand over Lily’s mouth, her eyes darting to mine. It was the look of a criminal caught in a high-beam glare, though she recovered with practiced speed.

"She’s just talking nonsense. Kids get names mixed up," Elena said, her voice brittle.

I stood there, feeling the blood drain from my extremities. Today. Oliver had seen my daughter today. On the very day I was secretly celebrating "winning" her back from a trip abroad, she had taken my child to see that man.

"Am I a joke to you, Elena?" I whispered. My nails were drawing blood in my palms.

A flash of defensive rage crossed her face. She pushed Lily back into the bedroom and shut the door before turning on me.

"Miles, you’re the one who forced him out eight years ago! He’s just back in town for business. Lily ran into him, that’s all. Stop being so paranoid. It’s pathetic."

The "coincidence" excuse. The "business" lie. I looked at the iPad on the table, thinking of five years of photos—birthdays, park dates, coffee runs.

I didn’t have the energy to scream. When you hit the absolute bottom of disappointment, you don’t cry. You just go numb. I sat back down and turned on the TV, staring at a static screen, refusing to look at her.

Elena stood there, agitated by my silence. She was used to my desperation, not my absence. "Fine," she snapped, adjusting her blazer. "Think whatever you want. You’ll be back to your usual self by morning. You always are."