Sweet Romance13 min read
The Third Call
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I called him my little sun. He called me his wife like it was the only private joke left between us.
"I like you a lot," I told Wyatt the first time I saw him.
He smiled, and I wrote him a note in my phone: "Little Sun."
He fit around my life like a shadow at noon. He knew my coffee order, my guilty snack drawer, the exact way I tossed my hair when I was thinking. We brushed our teeth together in the morning and he would reach over and mess up my hair with wet fingers.
"Breakfast?" he'd ask, tapping my shoulder.
"Yes," I'd say, already in love.
"Then I will bring you a dozen of the new puff pastries when I get off," he'd promise, and he always did, grinning with two small dimples that made me forget how to count.
We signed the papers on a cloudy day, both in white shirts. At the registry I remember the red book heavy in my hand. Wyatt stared at it like it was a small planet he had just discovered. He picked me up in front of the government office and wedged his chin into the hollow of my neck.
"Happy new life, my little wife," he murmured.
I believed it then. I let myself rely on him. I listened to him hum the same stupid song while we packed leftovers. I let him steal my fries and call me silly.
There were soft, private rules between us: he would never go out late without telling me. I would not pry into his past because he had given me his future. We agreed without saying so.
Then one night a stranger called his phone and kept calling. He hid in the bathroom like a small afraid animal. I took the call before he could stop it; a shaky voice, frantic and pleading. "Wyatt, please… come back to me," the woman sobbed.
I hung up. I told Wyatt I wasn't angry; I told him I understood people had histories. He said, "She is just someone I knew." He did not look me in the eye. He did not have to; I felt the rift like a cold draft under a door.
"I am your wife," I said.
"You are my wife," he answered, but his answers began to gather commas and pauses as if he needed time to choose them.
I learned her name the way one learns the names of storms: Joanne Tariq. She found me on social media and sent a friend request with one line: Can we talk?
"Delete her," I told Wyatt. He sent back three dots and, "Why are you awake?"
I accepted Joanne's request like an idiot detective. Her first message was not apology but accusation. "Please get him to leave you," she wrote. "He never stopped loving me."
"Why would you ask me that?" I typed, and then sent the screenshot to Wyatt. He replied, "Don't talk to her. Sleep."
He didn't come to collect me that evening when I expected him. He made a few promises by text and then stopped answering.
"So you're here early," he said the next day, smiling as though nothing had cracked.
"I saw a message," I said. "She called last night."
He admitted it was his ex. "We were young," he explained. "My parents never accepted her because of her health. Things happened."
"Is she the one who broke your heart?" I asked.
He turned his face away. "She was my first love," he said like a confession and a sickle at once.
"You said you'd save me first if we fell into water," I reminded him once, stupidly, as if we were answering a joke in bed.
"I would save you," he said without hesitation. "Only you."
So I kept living in the small warm orbit we had. People around us whispered; a rumor is a small leak that swells into a flood. The neighbor's kid called me names on the stairs until I'd grown used to flinching. Joanne staged scenes outside my apartment until one day she collapsed on my doorstep, sobbing, then accused me of pushing her.
"You're lying," I said, and Wyatt ignored her.
He always ignored her. He took my hand like a shield and closed the door.
But once again he left without me.
On the way to a company outing to climb a mountain, everything looked ordinary. Wyatt was organized and cheerful. "Bring a jacket," he told me. "I'll make sure you don't get sunburned."
At the base of the trail, a taxi screeched to a stop and a woman ran toward him, dragging an older woman who claimed she was Joanne's sister and begged for a favor: "She needs blood. She jumped. She's RH negative. Only Wyatt's blood matches."
For a long time I thought the world was a stage and people were pieces of a play. Then Wyatt took two steps toward the woman and walked away with her in a taxi. He didn't look back. He didn't hand me his jacket.
"You promised you'd save me first," I whispered into the empty space he left.
He saved her.
There was an earthquake on that mountain.
We stayed in a small house that night. I woke up to pounding on doors, a wrong roar like an animal. The slope broke. People screamed. I fell and something heavy struck my leg and pressed into my belly. The world turned into a dark, hard thing.
I remember only light and voices after that. Wyatt's voice, the paramedics, the thud of shoes. I remember someone shouting my name and my own voice answering: "Wyatt."
They took me to the hospital. The machines kept beeping. My mother washed my face and told stories about holy images as if that could stitch the breaking.
"You weren't with me," I said when I could speak. "You left me there."
"She needed me," he said. "She—"
"You saved her," I finished.
He knelt by my bed and his hands shook. "I thought… if she was alive I had to go. I didn't think it would lead to—"
"It led to me losing our child," I said.
"It was the earthquake," he argued.
"It was your choice to be there," I answered. "You chose."
My friends were furious in a way that warmed me like a stove in winter. They filled the hospital room and told me that Wyatt was a fool and worse. They protected me. They told the truth I could not say because the wound was too close.
"He's selfish," Alaina shouted from the chair by the window. "He chose a phantom over his family."
After the surgery, after the dark days when I couldn't sleep and screamed silently in my pillow, I told him what I had to tell him.
"We should divorce."
He looked like someone had stolen sunlight from inside of him. He had always known I'd call him by my own pet name, never 'Mr. Riley.' When I said "divorce," his face folded in on itself.
We signed the papers on a stormy afternoon, the sky the same color as when we'd married.
"Bye," I said, and avoided saying it any other way because I meant it to be clean and unrepeatable.
Months later, I moved to a different city. I went to a cheap hotel in the hills to try to sleep under a different sky. I found a folded letter in a book someone had left at the bar. It had Wyatt's handwriting—scratchy, too big, like a man trying and failing to be careful.
He had written to me thirty-one times. He had thrown away the first thirty. He told me he had smoked for the first time after we separated to feel less like he was always on the edge. He wrote that he still missed my toothbrush and had put a new one in the cup. He wrote that he had dreamed of saving me instead of her.
"You love me," the letter read. "You can hate me too. I will accept it. I will hold the place in your heart even if it's a hole with jagged edges."
I kept the letter folded under my pillow like a small, dangerous treasure.
After I left, Joanne did not disappear. She persisted. She came to my building again. She called the local news with a dramatic story about being abandoned after a suicide attempt by a "tragic ex" and how my husband had rescued her. She painted herself as the wounded saint and I as the mountaintop thief. Neighbors watched, hungry for scandal.
They wanted blood and they got it.
There was the public punishment.
It began at a community meeting in the park. The city had arranged counseling sessions for those affected by the mountain collapse. Everyone who had been near the site was invited. I went because grief tends to be contagious and I wanted evidence of other people's wounds. Wyatt, who had been avoiding cameras, stood on the other side of the field with Joanne and her family. He would not meet my eyes.
"You should talk," Joanne whispered to him as if they were in private. "Tell them the truth. Tell them what you did."
He hesitated.
I sat on the bench then, my arm bare, the light making the scar on my side look pink. The group counselor called roll. People murmured. Photos from the evacuation flickered on a projector: shaking cliffs, dust, hands pulling out people.
"Would anyone like to speak?" the counselor asked.
My throat was tight. A woman with a cut on her forehead stood and said, "I want to say thank you to the rescuers." Applause. Then another stood and said, "We must be careful who we praise too easily." That drew nervous laughter.
Then Joanne rose up like a small ship.
"I just want to say," she began, voice high and theatrical, "that there is a man who saved my life. He is a hero. My husband—no—my rescuer—was brave to come."
A ripple of murmurs. Some clapped automatically. Others looked toward Wyatt.
He stepped forward.
"Joanne—" he started.
"Let her speak," I said out loud. My voice cut through the perfunctory claps. People turned.
She pointed at me with a thin white finger. "You," she said, "you are a liar. You lie about how you got him. You lie to the neighborhood. You pushed me. You are cruel."
"That's enough," I said. I stood up, because there are lines you don't cross in front of a crowd.
Joanne's sister began to shout that I had schemed to take Wyatt away. "She married him for money!" someone in the back added.
"Stop," Wyatt said suddenly, his voice brittle. "Everyone, stop."
He had that look then—like a man who knows his house is burning and still tries to step into the flames to rescue what he can. He tried to explain, to excuse, to tie the ropes of his actions into something the crowd could accept.
"You don't understand," he said, hands fluttering. "She really did jump. She needed blood. I went because I thought—"
"You went because she begged you," I snapped. "You went because there was a woman on the phone and you answered her."
He flinched like I'd slapped him. People leaned in. I wanted them to see the shape of what had happened—not just the headlines and the white lies.
Then Alaina stood. She had been at the hospital the night I first woke up. "We have messages," she said. "We have calls, we have video. Joanne, you asked my friend to tell Wyatt you were lying about being well so he would come because you knew your family couldn't ask him—"
"I'm not a liar!" Joanne screamed.
"You faked," Alaina said, "a call, a scene. You staged the panic so you'd pull him back like a fishing hook. You told everyone you were fragile so they'd sympathize with you."
Joanne's face changed. It was the expression when someone realizes the stage has been exposed and the audience is no longer in their palm. First she froze, then she blinked wildly. "No," she said, a child's denial. "No, no, you don't—"
A woman in the crowd shoved her from behind. "You used a crisis to steal a man," she said. "Do you not see what you've done? Do you not see the child she lost?"
Joanne tried to speak, but her words came out dry and small. "I—" she began, then stopped as someone pulled up a thread of video on a phone. It was footage from outside the hospital showing Joanne being carried out and exaggerating her limp. Another man, a friend of Wyatt's, produced a series of texts where she had admitted she would do anything to get him back. The park, normally a quiet space, turned into a courtroom without a judge.
"You lied in writing," the counselor said evenly. "This is dangerous—faking injury to get someone to come. There are laws about deception in emergencies."
Joanne's bravado cracked. She lurched and began to sob in a high, theatrical way that might have been moving if the truth did not gasp beneath it. "But I loved him," she bawled. "I loved him. I needed him."
"You played with people's lives," a neighbor shouted. "You nearly caused more harm. The emergency teams had to divert. Children were endangered."
The crowd began to change. Sympathetic faces hardened into something colder. Phones came up to record. A dozen live streams started. Camera phones taste the scent of scandal and gather like birds.
Joanne's sister clutched her and begged for calm, but the calm had already gone. "You're being recorded," someone said to Joanne. "People will see this."
Joanne's voice quickened into a plea. "I—I'm sorry. I'm so—"
Wyatt stepped forward and put his hands on her shoulders like a man trying to hold a crumbling bridge together. "Stop it," he said quietly. "Just stop."
"Why did you let her manipulate you?" I asked, because the wound needed air. "Why did you think she had more claim on you than your marriage? You left me on the mountain to go help a woman you once loved and who, as it turns out, was playing with lives."
He pressed his fingers to his forehead. The weight of the crowd pressed on him. "I thought I was saving a life," he said. "I thought it was the only thing to do."
"Then why didn't you call me?" I said. "Why did you disappear like I was a book left on a table?"
He could not answer. For a moment he simply looked like a man whose map had been folded and lost. Then Joanne, who had attempted to play the martyr, began to plead in a new voice—one that sounded small and frightened.
"People are watching you," someone said. "Your charity is not noble if built on theatre."
They turned on Joanne like a tide. Voices rose: "Shame!" "How could you?" "You staged a crisis!" A man filmed her apology and posted it. A neighbor made sure the local rescue squad was informed. Another contacted her workplace.
What happened next was not a neat legal hammer but public unraveling. Her employer placed her on leave after irate callers reported falsified hospital statements. The community association rescinded the small donations they had promised for her recovery. On the local livestreams, people replayed the footage of her dramatic fall at my doorstep and the texts revealing her plan. Comments flooded in: condemnations, mockery, fury. Neighbors I had never seen before stepped forward and told their stories about being manipulated by Joanne years ago.
Joanne's reactions shifted in a jagged line: shock, denial, bargaining, then collapse. She tried to laugh it off at first. "It was an accident," she stammered. "It's complicated." When the proofs were set like stones on the table, her face went white. She covered her mouth, then threw her hands skyward in a gesture of surrender and suddenly, in front of everyone, she crumpled.
"You did this," a woman said, spitting the words. "You almost killed people with your lies."
Joanne screamed a wordless sound and then began to plead for forgiveness. People filmed. Some applauded the unmasking. A few, disgusted, spat and walked away. A neighbor recorded the scene and sent it to Joanne's family. Someone sent it to the hospital's patient relations office.
Then a new cluster of accusations surfaced—doctored photos of Joanne and the CEO of a small local company, messages showing she had encouraged false statements from a friend to secure Wyatt's attention. Each revelation was a small metal file being hammered into a coffin made of credibility.
Wyatt stood beside her as the world unpeeled. He looked broken because at the center of everything he had been trying to do the right thing. He had made choices that hurt me. He had made choices that helped her. The crowd had been given a script now and they read it with furious interest.
"Why didn't you tell anyone the truth earlier?" an older woman asked.
"It was complicated," he whispered. "I thought—"
"Thought what?" I demanded. "That your secret would do less damage than your honesty?"
Silence. Then people turned to me. Their eyes were curious, hungry, relieved. For weeks afterward the livestreams replayed the moment poorly acted pleas turned into confessions. Joanne was excoriated on social media. Her boss called to fire her. One volunteer group rescinded the benefit they had planned for her recovery.
You could say it was public punishment: the exposure, the cascade of consequences. Joanne sat in the middle of it and nothing she did could stem the river. She tried to explain, then apologized, then begged. Her mask of fragile victimhood had been peeled off on the green public stage, and the neighbors who had once felt sorry now felt justified in their revulsion.
Wyatt, in his own way, was punished too. He was shamed in the press for his lack of judgment. Friends who had watched from the sidelines called him selfish. His parents confronted him publicly at a charity dinner later that month, demanding why he had not been at my bedside when I woke. He stood in front of them, his face an oval of regret, and said nothing that could ease anything.
I listened to it all and felt a strange mix of vindication and emptiness. Did seeing Joanne fall make the hole inside me less raw? No. She had been exposed, and her ruin felt like cleaning a wound with a rough cloth—necessary, painful, and not wholly cleansing.
In the months that followed the tide changed. Joanne's online abuse slowed as people turned to new outrages. Wyatt moved away temporarily. I found a place of quiet and wrote my own rules of living: no more silent allowances, no more letting other people's histories sit like unlit candles in our bedroom.
Out of the rubble of that season came two small, unexpected things. One was a letter—Wyatt's, imperfect but honest. It said, "I love you. I failed." It did not absolve him. It did not ask to be forgiven. It only existed.
The other was me, learning to be alone without being lonely. I walked through markets and bought a small, stubborn plant in a clay pot. I named it Star because I once wanted to name our child after the night sky. I read the letter and folded it three times. I kept the corner of it always in my bag like a splinter of something both bitter and sweet.
He wrote, "If you never speak to me again, I will still love you a little more each day." It made me sad in a way that felt honest and terrible.
Sometimes people want a clean revenge—a shout, a dramatic turning. What we lived through wasn't only that. It was messy. Joanne was publicly condemned and punished by the community; that was the revenge people wanted. Wyatt was punished by himself and by loss. I was punished by pain. Justice was a messy thing that didn't heal everything.
One night, months later, I sat at the window of a cheap apartment and unfolded his last letter. The words were clumsy but unadorned.
"I keep your toothbrush cup on the counter," he wrote. "It looks smaller now."
I pressed my thumb to the ink like it could smudge the memory and then I put the letter back in its envelope. I planted Star on the windowsill and I watched the city below as lights blinked one by one. I thought of that hospital bed and the beeping monitors and a promise to myself:
I would not let a manufactured drama decide my life again. I would choose what I let be my story.
"Why did you keep his letters?" my friend Hanna asked when she came to visit. She had been the one to yell at Wyatt the night of the operation and the one to stand up for me in the park.
"Because I wanted to remember," I said. "Not him, not exactly. I wanted to remember how I loved, how I hurt, how I survived."
She nodded. "You deserve peace."
"Maybe one day I'll forgive him," I said. "Forgiveness is for me, not for him."
Hanna squeezed my hand. "Then forgive for you. Nail the door shut on the past. Plant new things."
I did. I planted seeds in the small pot beside Star and called a friend to help me pick fresh curtains. I wrote some answers to Wyatt's letters and never sent them. Sometimes I read them in the dark and laugh at how earnest his handwriting still looks.
Once, months after the public exposure, Wyatt came back to town. He waited on the sidewalk outside a café where I had agreed—out of curiosity, out of old habit—to meet a mutual friend. He looked smaller than memory had kept him.
"You look tired," I said when I saw him.
"I am tired," he said. "I am sorry."
"What do you want from me now?" I asked.
"To close the book," he answered. "To let both of us live."
"Then go live," I said. "Find a life that won't make other people into props."
He laughed, a short, broken sound. "Star," he said, pointing at my windowsill. "The plant. Is it doing well?"
"It's alive," I said.
"Good," he said. "Take care, Eden."
I stood on the sidewalk and watched him go, his shoulders folding forward, as if carrying the world on one arm. The city hummed. A tram passed. A child laughed, and the sound stitched something warm into the day.
In my bag, the corner of his last letter still whispered like a small secret. I folded it again and placed it in the inner pocket of my wallet. I would keep it until one day even the ache of it softened into a memory that did not sting.
"Goodbye, Wyatt," I said, in the end, not triumphantly but as if closing a book I had finished reading.
And the plant by the window turned its tiny leaves toward light.
The End
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