After my husband kicked me out, I used my father’s old card. The bank panicked — I was shocked when…
Marissa Lane pressed her palm against the warm metal of the taxi door and stepped into the thick Atlanta heat. It was just past sunset, the kind of evening where the sky glowed orange and the air felt heavy enough to drink.
The glow of the city bounced off the glass towers, and the air tasted like exhaust, fried food, and summer storms.
She was still wearing the same jeans and faded T-shirt she’d slept in at the hospital, the fabric stretched and wrinkled from two straight weeks of stress. Her lower back ached from too many nights spent in a cracked vinyl recliner, with the rhythmic beeping of monitors for background music and the sour hospital coffee churning her stomach.
Two weeks in rural Alabama, watching her mother’s chest rise and fall, praying it wouldn’t stop. Two weeks of quiet dread, signing intake forms and financial paperwork, calling insurance companies that placed her on hold beneath soft piano music and prerecorded voices thanking her for her patience.
Today, finally, the doctor had taken Marissa aside, his expression gentler than it had been in days.
“She’s stable now,” he’d said. “We’re not out of the woods, but you can go home and rest. Really rest.
We’ll call if anything changes.”
Home.
The word had felt like a warm blanket. She clung to it all the way from Alabama to Georgia, through the long highway stretches where pine trees blurred into dark shapes and the radio mumbled old songs she barely heard.
She rolled her suitcase across the polished marble lobby of Crest View Towers, the luxury high-rise she and her husband, Derek Holt, had lived in for almost ten years. Her footsteps echoed between high ceilings and modern art installations.
The concierge looked up and gave her a polite nod, but his eyes slid away quickly, like he didn’t want to linger on the dark circles beneath hers.
Ten years. Ten years of shared furniture, shared holidays, shared jokes about the older couples in the elevator. Ten years of believing they were building a life together.
The place felt as familiar to her as her own skin.
She knew which elevator arrived fastest, which neighbor cooked too much garlic, which hallway light flickered every time a storm rolled through. She’d texted Derek from the hospital parking lot hours earlier.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
TAP → NEXT PAGE → 👇
