His hand froze. He should have closed it right then. He should have walked away and waited for her to come back. But something in those words made his heart start pounding. His hands were trembling as he pulled out a chair and sat down with the notebook in front of him.
He read the first line.
“I’m terrified he’s going to get tired of me and leave.”
He kept reading, unable to stop himself now.
“Every time he’s quiet, I assume he hates me.”
“I’m scared he thinks I’m cheating when I’m just having a panic attack in the bathroom.”
“I don’t know how to explain that I love him and still feel this broken inside.”
“Divorce would probably be easier… for him.”
Daniel couldn’t believe what he was reading.
For months, he’d been convinced that Emma was hiding someone else. That she was planning to leave him. That every locked door and every cancelled plan was evidence of her betrayal.
But she’d spent those same months convinced that she was too much for him to love. That he would eventually realize she was broken and walk away.
They’d been living in parallel nightmares, each too terrified to speak, both certain the other person wanted out.
His hands shaking, Daniel turned the page.
There were more entries, dozens of them, each one dated.
She’d been documenting this for months. There were descriptions of triggers he didn’t understand. Notes about her heart racing so fast she thought she was dying. Hands tingling and going numb. Vision blurring at the edges. Sitting on the bathroom floor, counting tiles over and over so she wouldn’t scream and scare him.
Then he found a line that absolutely gutted him, written in smaller letters like she was ashamed to even put it on paper.
“I wish I could tell him what’s happening to me, but he’ll think I’m crazy. Or weak. Or just drama.”
Daniel sat there with the notebook in his lap, and the pieces finally came together. The late nights weren’t an affair. The locked doors weren’t a betrayal. The distance wasn’t because she’d stopped loving him.
It was anxiety. An invisible monster he’d never learned to recognize because nobody in his life had ever named it.
And his silence, his pulling away, his cold shoulders and late nights at work, had been feeding that monster the whole time, making it grow bigger and louder in her head.
Daniel sat there for what felt like hours but was probably only 15 minutes, staring at the notebook in his lap. The realization of what he’d done, what they’d both done to each other through silence and assumptions, was crushing.
The “other man” in their marriage wasn’t a person at all. It was her anxiety.
He heard the bathroom door open down the hall. Emma’s soft footsteps. He knew he should close the notebook, put it back, and pretend he hadn’t seen it. But something stopped him.
They’d spent months pretending, and look where it had gotten them. To the edge of divorce, both of them miserable, both of them convinced the other person wanted out.
Instead, Daniel did something he’d never done in his entire life. Something his parents had never taught him and he’d never thought he was capable of.
He picked up a pen from the cup on the table and opened the notebook to the next blank page.
At the top, in clumsy capital letters because his hand was shaking so badly, he wrote, “THINGS I DIDN’T KNOW BUT WANT TO TRY TO UNDERSTAND.”
Read more on the next page 👇👇👇
