My father chose her. That’s how it felt the moment he slid that ring onto her finger and erased me with a single signature. His will, rewritten in secret. His house, his savings, his legacy—suddenly hers. Her eyes met mine across the table, the faintest curl of a smile on her lips, and something inside me splint… Continues…

I had rehearsed a thousand accusations, but when I finally spoke, all that came out was the one question I’d been too afraid to ask: had he ever imagined my life without him in it.

The silence that followed was brutal. His shoulders sagged, his bravado crumbled, and the man who’d seemed so sure of his choices suddenly looked small and unbearably human. He admitted what I’d suspected but never heard aloud—he’d been chasing a second chance at happiness, blind to how it looked like abandoning his first.

Liv’s defenses softened with his. She confessed she’d mistaken my distance for indifference, assuming I’d already let him go. It stung, realizing how much of this was built on guesses and misread silences. The will, the money, the house—they could all be changed with a pen. What mattered was that, for the first time, we were rewriting us instead of erasing me.