Thirteen Hours to Unlove You Chapter 2

After that, I learned to navigate the world with a cool, surgical detachment.

I stopped asking for tenderness. I stopped assuming anyone was permanent. I watched people’s numbers the way meteorologists watch barometric pressure—waiting for the inevitable drop so I could step back before the storm hit.

My father’s timer eroded slowly over the years, ground down by the friction of suburban routines, his second marriage, and the arrival of a new baby girl who absorbed whatever patience he had left. One day, his counter touched zero, and our phone calls dwindled to holiday pleasantries before tapering into silence.

Friends, roommates, boyfriends—they all arrived with a digital clock over their heads. Some had three years; some had six months; some had two weeks. I watched their eyes soften with affection, watched them make promises they fully intended to keep, and watched the numbers tick relentlessly down. When the numbers got low, I withdrew. I was never surprised, never broken, and never caught off guard.

Then, in college, there was Ethan.

During our senior year, he looked at me like I was the center of the universe, his timer hovering comfortably in the three-digit range. For a brief, foolish window, I allowed myself to relax into him.

Then came the night I found messages from another girl on his laptop.

I looked up at him as he stammered an excuse, and his counter vanished. It wiped clean to zero in a single blink.

I didn't yell. I didn't break dishes. I simply blocked his number, packed my duffel bag, and watched him dissolve into the background noise of the city. A predictable exit brings no sharp agony, only the dull, familiar anesthetic of numbness.

I had accepted my fate. I was meant to be a witness to departures, an archivist of vanishing devotions.

Until I met Nicholas.

He was the single impossibility in my catalog of human beings.

The night we met at a mutual friend’s gallery opening in the city, everyone in that crowded room carried a flickering, finite sum above their heads—two hundred days, forty-eight hours, seventy minutes.

Except Nicholas.

Hovering above his dark, unruly hair was not a number. It was a single, crisp, luminous loop of white light:

[∞]

Infinity. Endless. No expiration.

My heart, dormant for nearly a decade, hammered violently against my breastbone.

I stared at that silent glyph for ten unbroken minutes. All the years of orphan-like vigilance, the quiet shame of being the child left behind, the cold nights spent bracing for the axe to fall—all of it seemed to soften under that impossible white loop.

I convinced myself Nicholas was an act of grace. That whatever cruel architect had cursed me with this sight had finally taken pity on me, sending me a man whose love was woven from something indestructible.

He would love me forever. He would never walk away. I would never have to watch him dissolve.

I married him with everything I had left in me.

For three years, our life was an answered prayer. Nicholas was steady, patient, deeply attentive. He remembered how I took my tea, held me through the nightmares I never explained, and gave me the kind of effortless safety I thought only existed in fiction. And every morning, when I opened my eyes and looked at his face on the pillow beside me, the [∞] was there, steady as the morning sun.

I let my armor fall. I stopped looking for the exits. I allowed myself to believe that I was, finally, home.

Until tonight—our third wedding anniversary.