The apology landed. Nothing changed.
You heard it. You may have even believed it was real. He looked at you differently that night, smaller, sorry, genuinely undone. And some part of you wanted to let that be enough, because the alternative was a kind of grief that doesn't have a clean name in any language you know. But the apology did one thing: it closed his chapter of the story. Yours was still open, bleeding at the edges.
