Sweet Romance14 min read
He Hid Me Under His Desk
ButterPicks12 views
I never meant to file for divorce. I packed the papers because I had to know, and because I had finally decided I wasn't going to be patient with a life that felt like a loop of polite lies.
"You're going to sign them?" I said, lifting the packet so the sunlight through his office blinds made the paper glow.
Elwood Hayashi looked at me like I had suggested a change in the weather. "Don't be dramatic, Mariah."
"Elwood," I said, and put the papers on his desk, "we need to talk. I want a divorce."
He smiled that careful smile he saved like a card. He always smiled when he wanted to change the subject. "Not today," he said.
Then he reached over the desk, and I felt his hand guide my head under the open drawer like a child hiding a toy.
"What—" I started, and the edge of the drawer pressed against my temple.
"Shh," he said. His fingers were cold through the thin hair at my crown. "Someone's coming."
Footsteps in the hallway. A soft knock. A student's voice floating through the gap in the door.
"Professor Hayashi, can I ask—" A girl's voice, smaller than the space between us.
Elwood didn't move his hand. "Come in."
The girl stepped across the threshold, hesitation in the way she folded her hands. "Professor, will I pass the final? If I don't, can I take the make-up?"
"Depends on how you prepare," Elwood said, mild as water. He kept the slow cadence he used when he taught.
There was a pause. The girl said, breath small, "If I pass, I'll—I'll do anything."
My heart lodged itself in my throat. I dared a sideways look: the drawer hid me; I couldn't see anything but my own palm pressed to the wood. I could hear her breathe.
"Anything?" Elwood said, and at that sound the world grew and narrowed at once.
"Yes." She hiccupped. "Anything."
"Then," he said in that same teacher-placid voice that once made me study until my eyes blurred, "prepare well for the make-up."
I crawled out from under his desk as soon as the office cleared.
"Why did you put me under the desk?" I snapped.
Elwood leaned back in his chair like he'd been waiting for this storm his whole life. "Say it again."
"Say what again?"
"My divorce request. Say it again."
I told him. "I want a divorce, Elwood Hayashi."
He tapped the desktop, a slow, soft rhythm. "Forget it, Mariah."
I handed him the signed divorce papers. He put them in the shredder like he was folding paper boats. "Write it better," he said. "That one's messy."
"Excuse me?" I clenched my jaw until something in my face hurt.
"Write it like you mean it," he said, and kissed the corner of my mouth, like a punctuation mark.
That kiss—half comfort, half mockery—sank into me, softened the edge I had lined up decades of resolve to keep.
"You can't be serious," I said later, when people were gone and the lights dimmed.
"I am," he said, and the voice shaped into a thing I didn't know. "But not now."
He shredded the papers. He put them in the machine with the same steady hand he'd always used to sort my mistakes into manageable pieces. He left not long after, an unfinished smile, a pocket square tucked as if the world still made sense.
I did not wait.
At nine that night his phone buzzed with two small words: "Check in."
I rolled my eyes and texted back the truth like a dare. "She's asleep."
I was not being clever. I was being petty. I put my phone down and fell asleep, the argument unfinished like a bad chord.
He came home in a flood of light and noise, fingers digging at locks, lights bursting on, clothes on the floor. "Where have you been?" he asked.
"At home," I said, and he looked at me like I'd told him I'd been somewhere else entirely.
"Who sent the message?" he asked suddenly, and there was an edge I had never felt on him before—sharp enough to cut my mouth into a question.
"A man?" I blinked. "What are you talking about?"
He started to unbutton his shirt slowly.
"I'm not mad," he said. "I just—"
His tie hit the chair like a faint accusation. He looked at me as if he had been given a puzzle he couldn't solve.
"Lazy," he said. "You're lazy. Repeat what you said."
"What?"
"Say you want a divorce again," he asked softly.
I said it. I meant it: "I want a divorce, Elwood Hayashi."
He came close and kissed my cheek, then the corner of my mouth. "Wait," he said. "Wait until tonight. We'll talk later."
When he left for the meeting his phone flashed again. He paused, glanced at it, and then answered. I could hear a woman's sob through the line.
I did not wait for explanations. I went out to find answers.
I followed his car to the hospital.
He walked like a man who had practiced not being seen. He went to the children's wing. He folded into the light and noise of the night waiting room and became something else: a tall figure with his hands in his pockets, and then—suddenly—someone's little boy ran to him.
"Daddy!" the child yelled.
The scream didn't have to be real to have the same effect on me. The boy's arms threw themselves around Elwood's waist like the world depended on it.
I stood behind a pillar and watched the woman who came up then—Dayana Watkins—lay herself into his shoulders and sob like a life had just been cut from her.
Whatever story I had been telling myself about being married to a man who was indifferent to me ended at that sight.
I didn't scream. I left the hospital like a ghost who had caught sight of the living.
Later, at home, he called and his voice was soft as if he had been reading from a book I couldn't see. "Where are you?"
"I'm somewhere else," I said. "It's over. I saw you. Stop lying."
He didn't hang up. "Who were you with?"
"Do you think I like you?" I cried, and when I said it my voice surprised me with how raw it sounded. "Do you think loving someone who looks at you like a relic is something I enjoy?"
"Who were you with?" he repeated.
"Does it matter?" I said. "Why did you have a child?" I said it like a question that wasn't mine to ask, like someone else was reading lines through my mouth.
For a long while he didn't answer. Then, quietly, he said, "Mariah—"
"Don't call me that," I snapped.
"I have to tell you everything," he said. "But not like this. Please—"
"Tell me now," I said. "Was that your child? How long have you been—"
He swallowed. "Since before you."
The words fell like stones into a well. I felt the world slow. For years he had been a presence like air: necessary, invisible. Then suddenly breathed into my lungs was this knowledge: he had another life I had never been allowed into.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I whispered like accusing no one and everyone.
"Because it's dangerous," he said. "Because it had to be quiet."
"Quiet for who?" I laughed once; it sounded like a shard. "You and your secrets?"
He didn't look like someone who lied for convenience. He looked raw and tired. He looked like the hand that would smooth my hair whether the room was burning or not. "Because the people who watch them don't care about our marriage."
"What are you talking about?" I demanded.
He told me part of the story in fragments—snatches of a life I had never suspected. An old friend who joined the police as an undercover, Stefan Barbieri. Stefan's death on a mission. A woman—Stefan's wife—who had carried a child into a dangerous place. A group of dealers who retaliated. "We thought we had cut their head off," Elwood said, "but they grew somewhere else."
"You're saying what? That you were spying? That you lied?" I said. "You put me under desks because—what—so your lovers wouldn't find me?"
He reached for me then, gently, like someone trying not to break glass. "I put you under the desk because they watch me. I hid you under the desk because if they ever knew everything, they'd come for you."
"If they came for me," I said, "they'd come anyway, Elwood. You kept me out of love or fear?"
"Both," he said. "Both at once."
The truth is funny in how it does not set you free; sometimes it chains you to the place you were always meant to leave.
I moved out the next day into my mother's old apartment. The first nights I could not sleep.
Two weeks later, the car came for me.
A driver from a food stall shoved me into traffic and saved my life by losing his own. The man who pushed me away from the oncoming car was the food stall owner—he bled into the road and did not get up.
"Call an ambulance!" I screamed, and someone did. But it was the chaos that I remember: glass, people, blood, the roar of taxis. When I crawled to him, tearing into my phone to call, I recognized the scar on his jaw, the way his beard clung to his mouth. It was Elwood, and he did not open his eyes.
He was taken into surgery. I sat outside the operating room and felt the world reduce itself to a single iron bench and the bright harsh light of fluorescent bulbs.
Someone sat across from me with a coffee and a cigarette. He wore sunglasses and a mask and introduced himself as Wells Barr.
"You shouldn't be here alone," he said. "You shouldn't be in this kind of trouble."
"You're the one who told me to shut up," I said, and laughed without humor.
"I'm a cop," he said. "Not the kind you see on TV. We don't like big speeches."
"Wells," I said, "what is this? Why didn't he tell me?"
"It's complicated," he said. He slid a photograph across the armrest. "This man? He's called Spider. He works the supply lines. He tried to take you out because he thought you were connected to Stefan's widow."
I stared at the photo. It was the same young man who had tried to talk to me in the convenience store two nights ago. "He hit the stall owner?" I asked.
"Yes," Wells said. "He wanted you out of the way."
My hands went numb.
"What is Elwood to you?" I asked.
"A good man who makes bad, necessary mistakes," Wells said. "And because of that, we owe him."
Days blurred. Elwood woke, brittle and apologetic. His leg had been shattered and fixed with metal rods. He had two long scars and a hospital bed smell that clung to the fibers of my sweater. He sat up and apologized in that same soft voice.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I thought keeping you in the dark was mercy."
"Mercy is not a word you get to use when you hide people's lives," I said.
"Let me fix it," he whispered. "Let me try."
The press conference came fast. The case that had been a whisper became a public clatter. The police rounded up a network that sold poison into people's veins, men who shrank like rats when the light hit them. The leader—Braxton Michel—was grabbed in a downtown raid. Bear Goto, his muscle, was filmed in handcuffs. Andre Abbott—"Spider"—was identified in traffic camera stills as the driver of the car that had slammed into the food stall.
Wells asked me to be there. "Because you saw things," he said. "Because you can make them real."
The day of the public reveal the courthouse plaza felt like a bowl of sound: phones held up like lances, reporters calling names, the crowd a living thing that breathed and hissed. The men were marched out with their hands banded in grey. Braxton's face had a sheen of bravado that didn't make his eyes look any less small.
"Is this the man you called Braxton?" a reporter asked, and I heard the camera shutters like staccato.
Wells put the microphone to my lips. "Tell them," he said.
I swallowed and looked at the men who had been so safe in their darkness.
"This is Braxton Michel," I said. "This is Bear Goto. This is Andre Abbott."
I pointed like an accusation. "They made people disappear. They tortured. They killed."
The crowd gasped like a wave. "They killed Stefan Barbieri," I said. "They broke his body to pieces and thought they'd buried the evidence. They did worse: they took a child's life of safety and scarred it. They tried to kill me because I asked questions."
A voice from the fold cried, "Scum!"
One of Andre Abbott's goons tried to shout over me, "This is a set-up!"
"Shut up," I said. "Your hands are full of other people's nights."
Braxton laughed, at first, and then the laugh died like a flame. Wells leaned forward. "Tell them what you did," he said to the men, and every microphone was an accusation.
Braxton's posture cracked. "We—" he started, and then the recorded evidence Wells' team had played on the big screen—phone calls, GPS coordinates, bank transfers—rolled over him like a tide.
"You're a coward," I said. "You killed to look big."
He blinked. His face went angry—then white. "You're lying!" he barked.
"No," I said. "Wells, play the footage."
They played video of transfers to shell accounts, of a GPS ping that put the van at the edge of the cliffs the night the woman—Dayana—walked into the sea. The crowd leaned in, listening like a body breathing out. People began to shout. A woman sobbed. A man in a suit made the sign of the cross.
I watched how each man crumbled. Braxton first became furious, then frenzied, then that confused smallness you see in animals when the thing they relied on has been snatched away.
"You think you can take lives and walk?" someone shouted.
Bear Goto's eyes were small and frantic. "I was following orders," he cried, the oldest defense in an old book.
"Look at them," I said, not looking away. "Feel them watch you. For once, remember the faces of the people you ruined."
The crowd turned from murmurs to a chorus. Phones rose to record. Someone yelled, "Get them to court!" Another cried, "Hang them out to dry!"
The unfolding punishment wasn't a bloody street execution. It was worse for them: social light turned into a spotlight that burned. They had their faces plastered across screens, their lies replayed in public, their friends turning away. Donors withdrew. Men who had envied them now spat at them. A former buyer—for whom Braxton had been a god—stood up in the crowd and slapped him. The slap echoed, a sound that a microphone picked up and the cameras didn't miss.
"You're a murderer," the man said. "You took a friend from us."
Braxton's mask broke. He staggered, not from the hit but from the sudden recognition that his world had failed him.
Bear Goto dropped to his knees when a woman from the rows pushed forward and spat, "How many mothers did you make widows?"
Andre Abbott started to plead, his voice small and high. "I'm sorry—please—" He came into the frame like a child caught with a broken toy, expecting forgiveness that did not belong to him.
"I remember nights where I thought I would die," a family member of a victim yelled, "and you slept like a god!"
People around them recorded this. The footage that circulated afterward was merciless: the faces of men who had enjoyed impunity turned to human grain, pleading in the open air. "Please," Andre said again. "I have a kid. I didn't mean—"
The crowd's mood curdled into contempt. "You didn't mean to?" the same man snapped. "You didn't mean to when you sent death?"
He started to cry. "I'm sorry" wasn't enough; it never is. Wells' hand rested on Braxton's shoulder like a final measurement.
"You will answer in court," Wells said. "And in the court of the people. Your names will be known, not just to those you bought but to every family you broke."
When they led the men away their little kingdoms collapsed into humiliation. People photographed them, shouted at them, spat when they neared. A woman—Stefan's sister—stood in front with a sign, "Justice for Stefan." People clapped. Some cheered.
I watched the men at a remove and felt something loosen in me. Not triumph, not hatred; something like the release of a tight knot.
The punishment continued later, quieter. In the courtroom Braxton listened as victims told their stories, the sound of the judge's gavel like an old hymn. Bear Goto's mother was shown a video of her son's actions; she wept and said, "I didn't know," and the public shame doubled the personal shame. Andre Abbott begged for mercy and got none.
There were no theatrics like rope and chair. There was the slow, meticulous, legal unmaking of them: testimony, evidence, public outrage. The worst part of all for them was the witnesses—families standing up to look into a man's face and say, "You took my son." Each statement was a blade that had the shape of a life.
After the arrests, the city that had once whispered their names now sang the victims' names. Someone chalked "Stefan" on the pavement near the cliffs. People started bringing flowers to the spot where Dayana's sandals were found.
Days later I found a letter in our mailbox from Dayana. "I'm sorry," she had written. "I couldn't see any other way. I took him to the sea like he'd wanted. We are both gone. Please forgive the children I hurt by being who I was." The letter had no signature; the note was a hollow apology.
Elwood and I sat at the edge of a graveyard in the rain for the funeral. The priest said things about the dead hearing, and I think both of us believed them.
"She wanted to take the grief away," Elwood said, more to the wet ground than to me. "She thought she could save someone by dying with them."
"Did you ever think to tell me that?" I asked. The anger that had been a steady companion flared. "To say 'Mariah, this is dangerous, so stay safe' instead of hiding me?"
"I did, in my way," he said. "I thought—"
He stopped.
"I wanted to keep you ordinary," he said at last. "If you were ordinary, the darkness couldn't find you. It was a stupid plan. It didn't keep you safe. It kept you stupid to the truth."
I wanted to be furious and free at the same moment, but grief has a way of gluing both to your chest.
Later, when the news cycle had moved on and Braxton's trial was still ongoing, Elwood came to me one night and put a bear-shaped cushion in my lap—the same silly plush I'd had on the couch since we'd first moved in. He'd been in surgery and had lost a lot of blood; he smelled faintly of antiseptic and iron. He sat very close, hands bracing the edges of the cushion.
"Forgive me," he said.
I let the cushion sit between us. "You hid me under a desk," I said.
"I hid you under a desk to keep you breathing," he said. "I am sorry for choosing walls over windows."
He bent his head. The room was so small and the world outside the window was so large, with a glow of distant traffic.
"You were never ordinary to me," he said then, and that voice—soft, insistent—was the same one that had taught me to finish my homework.
He did things after that which made my heart turn over in agreeable ways—the little things the bookish women in old romances used to call proof of love. He walked into rain to bring me an umbrella. Once, when I was shivering at a winter party, he slipped his coat off and draped it over my shoulders with a tenderness so deliberate I stopped breathing for a beat.
"You're ridiculous," I said.
"And you are worth being ridiculous for," he answered.
Another night I came home upset from work and he, who rarely spoke about feelings, made me tea and sat with me for an hour, not saying much but steady as a table. He would, against his own instincts, laugh at my jokes in a way he had never done in public. He let me see him bent over piano sheets, whispering a silly lyric he'd made up just to make me smile. Each small merciless sweetness rewired something inside me; the man who would hide truths was learning to carry them openly.
Even so, the dark places did not vanish. Court dates came and went; testimonies replaced the private grief with public procedure. Braxton, Bear, Andre—each suffered the collapse of their private thrones. Andre's pleas became hollow when the transcripts of his phone calls were read aloud. Bear Goto showed up in the dock with his hands clamped into the restraints and his jaw trembling, the last bravado stripped into nothing.
"How does it feel?" a woman asked him at the courthouse steps when his family wasn't looking.
Bear's answer was simply, "Cold," and then he turned his face from the microphone.
I watched them from a bench with a feeling that nearly resembled peace. It wasn't perfect. Loss had carved itself into our days. But the people who had been hurt had seen names, had heard apologies, had seen the men who had terrorized them set into motion the gears of justice. It didn't fix the past, but it made the present bearable.
When the verdict finally came, Braxton and his network were sentenced. They were led away flanked by officers, their heads down, their names shouted by victims like a litany. The press called it closure. Some days it felt close to that.
We sat together that evening afterwards, Elwood and I, in our small kitchen with the bear cushion between us. The cushion was silly and soft and ridiculous.
"I never meant to hold you like a secret," he said.
"Maybe don't make a habit of it," I said, and he kissed my forehead.
It is odd to say that by the time the trial ended I had moved beyond wanting him out of my life. I still had reasons to be furious, but some reasons fall away when the world rearranges itself and names are no longer whispers.
We did not rush; we rebuilt. He learned how to tell me things that were not curated for the convenience of other people. I learned to ask, and to demand, and to pull noise into questions. He still made plans that excluded me; I still, sometimes, planned without him. But we kept the small things: coffee poured at sunrise, an umbrella catch in the rain, a hand on the small of my back when we crossed the street.
Once, late at night, he pressed his forehead to mine and said, "I am sorry."
I laughed wearily. "You mean now," I said.
He smiled, that same old careful smile, tempered now by something like vulnerability. He leaned in and kissed me on the mouth with a softness that said more than words.
"We'll start again," he said.
"One day at a time," I whispered, and meant it.
The bear cushion sat in the middle of our couch like a small island of memory. When I took it to bed sometimes—because grief is lonely and habit is softer than concrete—I would hold it and think of the stall owner who didn't wake, of Dayana's letter, of Stefan's name carved in chalk near the cliff, and of how fragile the border between being safe and being known could be.
I had wanted him out of my life because I thought the life he kept was a kind of betrayal. In the end, what we both wanted was not the same. He wanted to keep me safe by making choices without me. I wanted to be safe by being included.
We were both right and both wrong.
And sometimes, in the quiet, I would find his hand reaching for mine. He would give me a small, ridiculous smile and say, "Forgive me." I would answer with a kiss.
There are things you cannot fix. There are things you can change. We learned the difference between the two in the long, slow after.
The End
— Thank you for reading —