"Essential Reads of 2026" 🔞🔥click here to read it first👉👉
I checked my phone again. It was 9:47 PM, and Mason; my husband was more than three hours late to my birthday dinner. My messages sat unread in our chats. Me: Are you on your way yet? Me: The restaurant closes at ten. Me: Mason, it's my birthday. Please, where are you? The candles on the cake had burned down to nothing. Fourteen of them melted into sad little pools of wax on a cake I'd ordered three days in advance. It was Vanilla buttercream with honey drizzle—Mason's favorite, not mine. Even on my own birthday, I chose what he liked. That should have told me everything about this marriage. I sat alone at the corner table of the Black Elk Lodge, the one Mason always reserved for us because it overlooked the river and the old pine forest beyond. It was the place where he first told me he loved me when we were seventeen. That was six years ago. Tonight, the chair across from me was empty. The waitress had stopped asking if I wanted to order. She just refilled my water with that careful, pitying expression that made me want to crawl under the table and disappear. I could feel the other diners glancing over, who probably already knew more about my marriage than I did. I was ‘poor Scarlett.’ The Blackwood princess with my pack in ruins, and a husband who can't be bothered to show up. I pressed my nails into my palms until the pain grounded me. I would not cry. Not here at least. My father and my brothers raised me better than that. They raised me to hold my spine straight even when the world was collapsing around me, and the fact that they were all dead didn't mean I could stop. I picked up my phone one last time and called Mason. It rang five times and went to voicemail. Fine. If that’s how he wants it, so be it. I left enough cash on the table to cover the drinks I'd nursed for two hours, picked up the gift I'd brought him—yes, I got my husband a gift on my own birthday, because I was still that kind of fool—and walked out into the cold. The October air hit me lik
