The silence after he left was deafening. Worse than the shouting, worse than the slamming doors. It was a hollow, echoing silence that felt like it was absorbing the very air from my lungs. I sank onto the sofa, the one we’d picked out together, and just stared at the empty space where he used to be. Done. Finally done.
It was only hours later, when I went to close the bedroom door, that I noticed it. The handle was gone. Not loose, not broken. Simply… gone. A smooth, round hole where the mechanism should have been. My stomach dropped. I tried the bathroom door. Same. The study door. Again. A cold dread seeped into my bones. He hadn’t just left; he’d stripped our home bare of its functionality, door by door.
Rage, pure and molten, surged through me. How could he be so petty? So cruel? This wasn’t just a breakup; this was an act of war. A final, deliberate insult to mark his departure. He was trying to dismantle our life, literally, piece by piece. He knew I wouldn’t have the money to replace them immediately. He wanted me to live with the constant, grating reminder of his malice. And I did.
Life without door handles became a surreal nightmare. Every day was a fresh indignity. Doors that wouldn’t latch properly, swinging open at the slightest breeze, offering no privacy. Doors that would stick, forcing me to pry them open with a butter knife or a credit card, scraping the paint. I felt exposed, vulnerable, like our home itself was bleeding. Each empty hole in the wood was a physical wound, and my anger simmered, a constant, low burn beneath my skin. I dreamt of confronting him, of screaming every curse word I knew. But he was gone. And I was left with the wreckage.
Then, five days later, I heard it. A faint clatter, from inside the house. My heart pounded against my ribs. He’s back. My blood ran cold, then hot with a renewed, furious indignation. Was he here to gloat? To take something else? I grabbed the heaviest thing I could find – an old, ceramic vase – and crept silently down the hall.
The sound was coming from the spare bedroom, a room we hadn’t used in months. The door was slightly ajar, and I could hear muffled grunts. I pushed it open slowly, my grip on the vase tightening.
And there he was.
He wasn’t gloating. He wasn’t taking anything. He was slumped on the floor, his arm twisted at an unnatural angle through the gaping hole where the handle used to be. His face was pale, glistening with sweat, a mixture of pain and sheer terror etched onto his features. He was trying to force something into the mechanism, his fingers bloody and scraped, but the door was stuck, the latch refusing to release. He was trapped. He was trapped by the very absence of the handles he’d ripped from their frames.
A flicker of grim satisfaction, sharp and bitter, shot through me. He deserved this. Let him suffer. But then I saw the way he was gasping, the frantic desperation in his eyes, and a wave of something else – confusion, concern – washed over the anger. He looked… broken.
I dropped the vase with a thud. “What are you doing?” I choked out, my voice barely a whisper.
He looked up at me, his eyes wide, watery. “I… I tried to put it back,” he whispered, his voice hoarse. “I had to.”
I helped him, gently at first, then more firmly, pulling his arm free from the sharp edges of the wood and metal. He collapsed against the doorframe, breathing heavily, clutching his bleeding hand. He looked up at me again, and in his eyes, I saw not anger, but a profound, aching regret.
“I didn’t take them to hurt you,” he finally managed, his voice cracking. “Not really.” He took a shaky breath, then looked down at his injured hand, a tiny, silver flash drive peeking from between his fingers. It was so small, I almost missed it. “I hid it inside the spindle of the main handle, the one on the front door. The one I knew you wouldn’t touch right away.”
My mind raced. What was he talking about?
He gestured weakly towards the now-empty hole in the spare bedroom door. “I thought I could come back, put them all back… and retrieve this when no one was around.” His voice was barely audible. “But I messed up the mechanism trying to get this one to latch. And then… I couldn’t get out.”
He looked at the flash drive again, then up at me, his eyes pleading. “I know you think I left because I cheated. You were right about that, in a way. But I wasn’t the one cheating. I found this. It’s proof. Proof that you… you were the one.”
My world stopped. The anger, the pain, the humiliation, the missing handles, his trap… everything blurred into one deafening, horrifying truth. He wasn’t being petty. He was trying to hide the evidence of my betrayal, to protect me from the fallout, to save us both from the devastating truth. He had left, not in malice, but in a desperate, misguided attempt to shield me, to shield us, from a secret too ugly to face. And his clumsy, heartbroken effort to put things back had only trapped him, and now, in the worst possible way, had trapped me too.
