Dante didn’t come home that night, and I didn’t call him to ask where he was either. I’d already seen Isobel’s social media updates.
After leaving the hospital that afternoon, Dante and Isobel returned to Isobel’s home to inform her family about her pregnancy. I saw a picture of Isobel’s grandmother affectionately holding Dante’s hand while saying something to him. He had an unusually tender smile on his face as he stroked Isobel’s abdomen with his other hand.
In the five years we’d been dating, Dante only agreed to visit my family with me once, after we’d decided to get married.
Even though it was less than a half-hour drive between our houses, he had never taken the initiative to visit my family before that, not even once. He said he didn’t like spending time with older people. It made him feel uncomfortable.
During that visit, he merely treated my family politely, unlike the warmth he showed Isobel’s family, which I saw through the photos.
I closed my eyes. Doing my best to quash the bitterness I felt, I turned off my phone.
The next day, I reached out to a few friends and told them that the wedding had been called off.
Dante once said that he didn’t like wedding ceremonies. He thought they were a meaningless formality. At my insistence, he reluctantly agreed to have a small wedding ceremony with only our closest family and friends invited.
Everyone around me knew how much I loved Dante. My friends were stunned to hear that the wedding had been canceled.
“Haven’t you been in love with Dante for ages? Why have you suddenly decided to break it off with him?”
An indescribable sense of heartache washed over me. It wasn’t easy to abruptly terminate a bond that had lasted for two decades. However, as it turned out, our relationship didn’t start on an equal footing. All along, I was the one who did my best to keep up with him. He had never paused for me.
