Sweet Romance12 min read
"Nine Years, One Goodbye, and a Life I Chose"
ButterPicks14 views
I woke to a video on social media: Finn Devine holding another woman, jumping off a bungee platform, their screams braided together. I watched, and my face did not move.
"You're scrolling like nothing's happened," Chandler Sandberg said from the kitchen doorway.
"It was nothing to me," I said, and I meant it.
When Finn called that night and said, "Get ready. I'll pick you up. There's something I need to tell you," my chest didn't slam, it didn't race. I folded my napkin, asked, "Okay," and kept my voice flat.
At the restaurant he sat across from me, phone on the table, thumb busy.
"Tonight's our breakup dinner," he blurted finally.
I smiled slowly. "Alright then. Let's break."
"Wait—" He looked stunned, then tried bargaining fast. "You’ve been with me nine years. Ask for anything. I'll give it."
"No need," I said, standing and picking up my bag. "Goodbye."
He was speechless long enough for the waiter to ask if we wanted dessert.
After I closed the door on him, I called Griffin Franklin.
"Griffin," I said into the phone, "do you remember saying something to me last winter? About taking me if I'm still single at thirty-five?"
"Jaidyn?" His voice tightened. "You okay?"
"I closed a chapter," I told him simply. "If you still mean it—come get me."
Three hours later I was staring at my doorbell. When I opened it, there he was—winded, hair damp from running, clutching red roses.
"Sorry," he said, breathless. "I was needed in ER for a trauma. I couldn't call."
He dropped to one knee right there on my doormat, pulled out a small box, and said, "Jaidyn Barker, will you marry me?"
It was fast. It was simple. It was right.
We went to the registry the next day. He made it official before the week ended. Chandler drove, I laughed too much, and he squeezed my hand and told me I smelled like him—like soap and the tiny coffee shop we both loved.
"From now on, you're mine," he said when we clicked selfie photos, and I thought: yes, and he is someone who knows what being here means.
Three months later we ran into Finn at a supermarket.
"Fancy meeting you here," he said, pushing a cart loaded with junk food. The girl behind him picked yogurts like she was building an altar to thirty-one flavors of sweetness.
"Hello, Finn," I said, calm as autumn. "Enjoy the yogurt empire."
Chandler watched as I picked out extra spicy snacks and insisted on the best brand of pickled chicken feet—an old private joke made public by my sudden hunger for nostalgia.
Finn arched an eyebrow. "Is he... your boyfriend?"
"He's my husband," I answered.
He laughed—thin, surprised. "Really? You married... him?"
"Yeah." I tilted my head. "You okay? Your muse seems to be working out for you."
He went crimson. He didn't speak. He left without the dignity of a goodbye.
That night, Chandler squeezed me on the couch and murmured, "Do you think he's dangerous one day?"
"No," I said quietly, "but he was never present. He picked the parts of me that fit his plans."
"Good," he said, like a promise. "I'm here."
Our life was ordinary and full. We did dishes, argued about how to fold laundry, stole covers when the other fell asleep first. He had an old sweater I loved and he always warmed my hands with it. He always remembered coffee the way I liked it. His attention was a quiet, steady flame.
"You're sweet in a way that's lethal," I teased him once.
"I like being lethal to loneliness," he shot back, smiling.
One night after an argument, when I came home late from work, I saw a paper-wrapped lunch on Chandler's table with a sticky note: "For my surgeon, my hero." I felt a little twinge I couldn't name.
"Someone brought you food?" I asked.
"A nurse," he said, voice flat, then grinned and added, "But I'm home now." He pulled me into the smell of his shirt and told me corny things about missing me. I felt the twinge dissolve.
Then Finn came back into my life with old habits: texts at odd hours, a string of "I miss you" that multiplied like rain. I muted him and left the messages to land softly in the archive of sadness I had already closed.
"Open it," Chandler said once when he saw me looking at my phone.
"What if he shows up?" I asked.
"Let him." He kissed my knuckles. "I'll be the one who opens the door."
Weeks later, Finn did show up at my office, flowers in hand and rain dripping from his collar.
"Please, can we talk?" he begged as if we were strangers who'd both forgotten the rules of years.
"I'm married," I said. "To Chandler."
"You just did this to spite me," he said, voice small and angry. "We were nine years. It mattered."
"It mattered to me," I said. "It didn't matter enough to keep you here when I needed you."
He gaped as if that was unfair. People at nearby desks peered toward us. I watched his expression move through stages: disbelief, forced charm, rage rising like heat in his face.
"You're overreacting," he spat. "You're being dramatic."
"Am I?" I asked. "You left me with my mother in hospital on the worst night, Finn. You were on a plane."
"I was working," he whined.
"You were choosing work over me so often that love felt like a schedule," I said. "People pick each other when the clock is not convenient. He picked me, Finn. He picked me when I needed him. He didn't leave."
"And what's so great about Chandler?" Finn sneered. "He's exactly the kind of man who'll be satisfied with crumbs."
Chandler—who had been watching quietly in the doorway—didn't lose himself. He stepped forward with slow calm and put a hand on my shoulder.
"You're talking about someone who saved me from drowning," he said softly. "And now you want us to act like your failure is our problem."
"He's my wife!" Finn shouted suddenly, voice cracking. "You can't—"
"I am not your possession," I cut in, louder than I'd planned. "I was with you for nine years. I appreciated some things, but I also learned to count the times you weren't there. If you want to ask me why I left, ask yourself whether you were present in the list of things that matter."
People around us murmured. Finn's face flushed purple. He reached for the flowers he had kept, now drooping. I could see him searching for his old control like a child pawing pockets for lost toys.
He ranted, he denied, then he tried to make me pity him. "I can change!" he cried, voice too high. "I didn't know what I had!"
Chandler's eyes sharpened. "You knew enough to leave," he said. "You knew enough to step away. You had nine years of chances."
The security guard came over and asked if everything was okay. Finn's teeth were bared. He grabbed his flowers and left, head down, while people sighed and whispered. The moment was small, public, humiliating in a petty way. But the real punishment would come later.
I didn't want to make a scene. I thought that would be over. I was wrong.
Two weeks later, Finn had the nerve to show up at the company gala where I was meant to speak about a new project. The ballroom was bright with chandeliers, and the guest list included colleagues, clients, and friends. Someone had let him in; he walked through the crowd like a man hunting applause.
I had rehearsed my speech twice. Chandler had insisted on staying close. "I'll be right there," he said, squeezing my hand.
On stage, I talked about teamwork and integrity, my voice steady. Around me were people who'd known me as the quiet one, the steady contributor. Tristan from HR gave a thumbs-up. Carolyn Murray in Marketing mouthed "Go, Jaidyn."
Halfway through, Finn walked up to the edge of the stage and called out, "Jaidyn!"
The room froze.
"Jaidyn, can we talk?" he shouted, panic-drunk and loud.
I felt something shift in the audience: confusion, then discomfort. People turned their heads. A few phones lifted.
"You're interrupting," the emcee began, but Finn raised his hands like a man who had rehearsed vulnerability on the subway.
"I messed up," he said dramatically. "I cheated, I was stupid, I—"
"Stop," I said. Then, because I couldn't let him hijack the night with pity, I walked down the steps deliberately slow, each step a punctuation.
The chandeliers seemed to amplify his voice. "Please, don't marry him," Finn cried. "Don't be with that—"
"Listen to me," Chandler's voice cut through from the edge of the crowd. He had stood up, and his hands were steady. "You're making a circus of this. If you have something to say, say it to me, not to her."
"No, no," Finn said. "It’s her I love. She belongs with me."
The crowd's murmurs rippled into a hum. Someone whispered, "Is that the ex?"
"Is she engaged?"
A young intern began to record. More phones lifted. I could see the red glow of live video spreading like spilled wine.
I stopped directly in front of Finn. My heels clicked against the marble.
"Everyone," I said, louder, and the room stilled. "This man stood across from me at dinner and told me our relationship was over."
He took a step forward. "I didn't—"
"You cheated," I said plainly. "You fell in love with someone else and then announced it online. You pretended we'd broken up earlier than we did."
A hush. Finn's face tightened. He opened his mouth, searching for lawyer-speak, some neat excuse.
"You told our friends we'd been over for months," I continued, "but in fact you hadn't told me. On the very night you said you wanted to 'break,' you had a bungee-fling on video and a 'muse'."
"That's not—" He stuttered.
"You're lying now," Chandler said. "You lied to our friend group, you lied on social media, and you lied to her face."
Finn looked around, seeing people whose opinions he'd once relied on. His expression changed: from surprise to anger, anger to denial, denial to panic.
"You don't get to rewrite nine years as if you offered me charity. You don't get to parade some new woman and expect me to disappear."
His voice lowered. "Please — we can try again."
"Try again?" I echoed. "Try again after you told me to move on? After you called it an early breakup? After you posted a smiling picture with someone who isn't me? Where were you when my mother was in surgery, Finn? Where were you during the nights I sat alone crying? You were on flights and at parties and in someone else's arms."
Someone in the crowd gasped. A client whispered, "He did that?"
Finn's face became a mask. "You can't talk—"
"Watch me." I reached into my bag and pulled out my phone. "I kept our old messages," I said. "I kept the timestamps. I kept the ones where you said you'd be home and then didn't come back. And I saved that video."
A ripple of surprise. He looked like a man who'd been caught with his hands in the cookie jar.
"Play it," he snarled.
I tapped my screen. The bungee video bloomed on the large event screen—Finn and the woman, laughing, falling, thrilled. The audience saw the comment thread beneath it: "My muse," and then his replies covering for a disappearance of months.
The room erupted. Phones buzzed like angry bees. Some people laughed; others tutted. Finn's face betrayed him now—color draining, veins standing out on his neck.
"You're a liar," one of our old friends shouted from the back. "We should have known."
Finn's lips moved, forming denials. "It's not—"
The camera panned in close on his nose, his eyes. He was trying to be composed, but the world had shifted. People pointed, whispers hardened into judgment.
"Shame," someone said softly. "He uses charm, then tosses it."
"Look at him," another voice said. "He looks small."
Finn's hands were trembling. He tried to take the stage step, but Chandler was already there, standing between us.
"She's my wife," Chandler said to the crowd, not to Finn. "She's someone who chose a life built on care, not excuses."
Finn reached for me—perhaps for reconciliation, perhaps for drama—and his hand closed on air. He fell to his knees, not in apology but in spectacle.
"Get up," I told him. "Get up and leave."
He refused. For a second, I felt the old compassion flicker—then extinguish. This show was for him, not for the truth. He wanted an audience so he could be pitied.
"Finn," Chandler said quietly, and the quietness was worse than a shout, "stand up."
He did, but his energy had bled away. He tried to smile for the cameras but it looked like a dog attempting to sing.
"Everyone," I said, addressing the ballroom, "he wanted you to see a man in love. Now you see him for what he is: a man who builds flimsy stories and expects people to perform forgiveness as if it's on cue."
A few people started to clap—an awkward, tentative clapping that turned into louder approval for our bluntness. Phones flashed. The emcee, recovering, announced, "We will take a brief intermission." People laughed nervously. Finn’s shoulders sagged.
He shifted from denial to pleading. "Jaidyn, please," he begged, face wet now. "I was wrong."
"You're asking for what you never offered." I was cold and precise. "You want one more chance, one more apology, one more 'we can try.' No."
Finn's eyes bulged. His mouth opened in horror, then closed quickly. He turned to the crowd, as if to find support, but found faces curious and unsympathetic.
"You betrayed the thing you said you wanted to care for," Chandler said with slow fury. "You posted her as your 'muse' and tried to erase her you called your girlfriend. That isn't love. It's selfishness."
Finn's breathing quickened. He looked truly frightened now, not of losing me, but of the new shape of other people's regard.
"Please," he said, voice thin, "I can fix it."
"How?" I asked.
"Ask—I don't know. I'll leave her. I'll—"
"That's not for you to demand," Chandler replied. "And we won't live by your changing whims."
Finn's face melted: first anger, then disbelief, then a hollow kind of shame. He began to pace, trying to salvage something, but the crowd had already turned. Voices started to narrate his fall: "He always loved the idea of loving." "He never stayed."
At the door, the security guard blocked his exit. "Sir, you need to leave," he said, professional and steady.
Finn lunged toward the door, but the guard's hands stopped him. People took photos. Someone recorded video and posted it live; the screen feed spiked with instant likes and comments.
The public punishment was not theatrical violence. It was exposure. It was the way a man accustomed to rearranging people's feelings found himself rearranged by a crowd's opinion. He begged, he denied, he tried to charm one last time, but the crowd's verdict hardened: he was petty, flaky, untrustworthy.
"You're done," Finn whispered at last, voice small in the hollowed hall. He left, not with swagger but with a defeated slouch. The night returned to its program, guests shook their heads and congratulated us for calling him out. People came up to me and said, "You were brave," and Chandler squeezed my hand as if our lives had been steeled together in that heat.
I watched Finn's figure recede through the glass doors, watched him go smaller and smaller until the rain hid him.
After that night, his messages dwindled. He tried once more to send me a long apology full of old promises, but Chandler and I deleted it together.
"You did this for you," Chandler said later, tucking my hair behind my ear. "Not for show."
"I know," I said. "But it had to happen. I couldn't let him make a spectacle of my choices."
The days after were ordinary and full: hospital shifts where Chandler came back smelling of antiseptic and cinnamon, dinners where we argued about trivial things and laughed about worse ones, nights where he traced constellations on my skin and called them my little stars.
There were small, secret moments that felt like fireworks.
One afternoon, I came home from a bad week and found a box of my favorite spicy noodles and a note: "For the woman who loves the right kind of heat—C." I laughed and felt lighter.
"Who sent this?" I asked.
Chandler walked out of the bedroom wearing an old sweater. "I wanted to make you feel seen," he said. "I like knowing you."
"You're always looking," I teased. "And that's the nicest crime."
He sniffed mock-offended. "I'm convicted," he answered, then leaned in and kissed me, careful and warm.
We had small rituals: he took my cold off my shoulders, I scolded him for not sleeping enough, he scolded me for not eating. He never made me feel small. He noticed the way I licked my teeth when nervous, the way I smoothed my skirt when proud. He carried me through normal disasters—flat tires, missed trains—like they were sacred tests of our teamwork.
Once, when I thought of Finn and the night on stage, my chest tightened in an old way. Chandler saw the shift.
"Do you still—" I started, and he held up a palm.
"Do you regret?" he asked instead.
"No," I said slowly. "I remember a girl who loved a lot, who forgave too much. I also remember the nights I sat at my mother's hospital bed and wished for someone to be there. Chandler was there."
He smiled like the sunrise. "Then that's enough for me."
"You're not just enough," I said, leaning into him. "You're everything I should have been brave enough to choose earlier."
We rebuilt a life from small honest things. We invited friends for lazy Sunday barbecue that Chandler burned the sausages but saved the laughter. Griffin came once with a ridiculous hat and declared himself my best man. Holly Jimenez, a nurse who'd once teased me about cooking for doctors, baked pumpkin muffins for the wedding reception Chandler planned late and quietly.
And Finn? He became a cautionary tale in our circle. Not a monstrous villain—just a man who kept apologizing in the wrong light. Once, months later, I saw him at a coffee shop, older in a way that wasn't about years but about understanding. He looked at me, then away. There was no grand speech, no imploring.
I felt nothing except a small, clean relief.
Months turned into seasons.
One evening, Chandler and I sat on the balcony with cheap wine, watching city lights. He put his hand over mine.
"Tell me one thing you didn't say on stage," he said.
I thought of apologies I had swallowed, of gratitude I had saved. "I never thanked you for staying," I said.
He looked surprised. "For staying with you even when you were broken?"
"Yes," I said. "For the nights you swapped sleep for surgery and still dialed my number as soon as you could. For making a shelter of your arms."
He kissed my knuckles. "You didn't have to get broken to be loved," he whispered.
"I know," I said. "But I'm glad I was brave enough to leave the thing that didn't fit me. I'm glad I grabbed you when I could."
He cupped my face. "And I'm glad you let me hold you."
That night, when the city hummed below, I closed my eyes and listened to his breath. It sounded like a heart that had chosen to be steady.
At times I still replayed the old bungee video in my head, not to hurt but to understand how fragile choices can be. When I did, I felt the old ache, then the warmth of Chandler's hand where mine rested. The ache faded. I chose presence, and that choice changed everything.
We didn't need big speeches every day. We needed small truths: coffee made right, a jacket handed without being asked, a voice that said, simply, "I'm here."
Once, at a small dinner among friends, Griffin raised his glass and said, "To people who show up." Everyone laughed. I looked at Chandler, eyes bright.
"To people who stay," I corrected him.
Chandler winked. "To the woman who let me in."
I touched my glass to his. "To the life we built," I said.
"To the life you chose," he replied, and his smile was an answer that sounded like home.
The End
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