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## Chapter Two: The Things That Stayed Broken
There were betrayals Elias could forgive.
Strangers failing him had been easy to accept. Systems were impersonal by nature; they crushed without malice. Employers, institutions, even fate itself—none of them had ever promised to care.
Family had.
That was what made it different.
He had married late. Not out of passion, but out of quiet hope—the belief that shared loneliness could become something sturdier if two people faced it together. Mara had seemed practical, grounded. She liked that he listened. She said he was safe.
At the time, Elias thought *safe* was a compliment.
For a while, the marriage functioned. Not happily, but smoothly, like a machine that hadn't yet begun to grind its own gears. He worked longer hours. She complained less when he wasn't home. Conversations thinned into logistics—rent, groceries, schedules.
Then the distance stopped pretending to be accidental.
She started coming home late. Guarding her phone. Smiling at messages she never shared. When Elias asked—carefully, gently—she sighed as if exhausted by his existence.
"You're imagining things," she said.
"You're too sensitive," she said.
"You never trust me," she said.
He wanted to believe her. He needed to.
The truth arrived unceremoniously, like most things in his life. A mutual acquaintance. A careless overlap of stories. A silence that lasted too long when confronted.
She didn't cry when he asked her.
She didn't deny it.
Instead, she looked relieved.
"I didn't mean for it to happen like this," she said, as if the phrasing mattered. "But I can't keep living like this, Elias. You're always… stuck. I feel like I'm wasting my life."
The words lodged deep. *Stuck.* *Wasting.*
As if his endurance had been a personal failing instead of a necessity.
She left within a week. Took what she could justify. Left behind what reminded her of him. There was no dramatic argument, no screaming finale. Just a quiet severing, precise and efficient.
Later, he learned she had moved in with the other man almost immediately.
Elias signed the divorce papers without contest.
Fighting implied belief that he was worth choosing.
That belief had already been eroded elsewhere.
His parents had been distant long before they were absent. They had provided food, shelter, and expectations—but little else. Praise was rare. Affection rarer. When he failed, it was treated not as misfortune, but embarrassment.
"Why can't you be more like—"
"Other people manage just fine."
"We did our part. The rest is on you."
As a child, he tried harder. As a teenager, he tried differently. As an adult, he tried quietly, hoping invisibility might be mistaken for success.
When his life began to visibly unravel—jobs lost, marriage failed—he reached out. Not for money. Not for rescue.
Just acknowledgment.
The response was silence at first. Then irritation.
"We can't keep worrying about you," his mother said.
"You're too old for excuses," his father added.
The calls stopped after that. Holidays passed unremarked. Messages went unanswered. Eventually, even obligation grew tired of him.
Abandonment, Elias learned, didn't always arrive with cruelty.
Sometimes it came disguised as *reasonable boundaries*.
By the time he reached thirty-nine, the pattern was undeniable. Everyone he had trusted had, in their own way, decided he was expendable.
That realization did not come with rage.
It came with clarity.
On the night it ended, Elias was alone—as he usually was. The city outside buzzed with artificial life, indifferent and endless. His body ached with a weariness deeper than fatigue. Each breath felt earned, as if his lungs were tired of arguing on his behalf.
He lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling, thoughts circling sl