She Married Him, So I Left

Claire Bennett always said she loved me. She also believed that if I truly loved her, I would understand why her foster brother, Adrian, had to come first. So when Adrian claimed he needed her insurance to enter psychiatric treatment, Claire asked me to let her marry him for one year—on the morning we were supposed to register our own marriage. After that, every boundary I questioned became proof that I was jealous, cruel, or incapable of respecting the man she called family. Claire demanded that I apologize when Adrian humiliated me, used the money we had saved for our home to buy him a condo, and finally agreed to carry his child. She believed that as long as I still married her in October, none of it counted as choosing him over me. She didn’t know I had canceled it while she was signing Adrian’s marriage certificate. Ten days later, I left for a fourteen-month assignment in Nairobi, leaving my key beside evidence of Adrian’s lies. Claire expected to find me waiting when she returned. Instead, she came home to an empty apartment.