“Oh, this?” he said with a grin, gesturing around the place like he owned it. “Naomi let me stay here. She said the place I was renting before was too small and not inspiring enough. She thought moving here might get the creativity flowing, you know?” He chuckled, the pale look in his face doing little to hide his smugness.
Then he let out a soft sigh, almost mocking. “When you love someone, you want to give them the best. Unlike some people…” he paused and looked at me. “Even after getting married, you made Naomi live in that dump. I mean, come on, man—how useless can you be?”
His words dug deep, stirring memories of those cramped years Naomi and I had spent in that small, old apartment. The place had a damp smell that clung to everything, especially after it rained. And the floors—those creaky, uneven floors that I’d fixed one by one, hoping to make the place a little less miserable. Every time it rained, water leaked through the cracks in the ceiling, and we’d run around with bowls, trying to catch the drips.
But this place—this place was pristine. It was ours, given by my mom for us to grow into, to build a family in if we chose. And yet Naomi had given it away to him, for years.
A thought crossed my mind like a slow-burning realization. A few years back, Naomi had been furious with Ben after catching him in some shady affair with a woman he’d been meeting up with in some dingy place. I remember she’d come to me, soaked and shivering, asking me to marry her. I thought she’d moved on. I thought she’d chosen me. But now, standing in the middle of that apartment, I wondered if giving him this place was her way of trying to pull him away from whatever mess he’d been in back then.
The commotion of my argument with Ben had drawn the attention of a few neighbors, and they were watching us from the hallway, muttering to each other.
“Who does this guy think he is?” someone said. “This is Mr. Smith and Miss Hayes’s apartment—everyone in the building knows that.”
Another neighbor chimed in, “Yeah, they’ve been here for years! They’re practically the model couple around here. Haven’t you seen their picture on the bulletin board?”
It stung. All those years I thought Naomi and I were building a life, sacrificing, making do with what we had. And here, in this other world I didn’t know, they were celebrated as some perfect, happy couple.