Caspian stood in the middle of the soundproofed room, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. The door opened. Lyra entered, her face pale but composed. Zara followed like a shadow, stopping just outside the doorway, her arms crossed, a silent and vigilant guardian.
This was the first time they had been alone since the day he had demanded a divorce, his voice cool and distant as he spoke of his duty to a dying Isolde.
Caspian’s first words were raw, desperate to find an escape hatch from his own guilt. “Is it mine?”
The question hung in the air, a final, pathetic grasp at a reality where he was not the monster. Where this was somehow her deception, not Isolde’s.
Lyra didn’t flinch. Her gaze, once full of adoration, was now as cool and clear as glass. She looked at him, truly looked at him, and saw only a stranger.
“Yes,” she said, her voice flat. She laid out the facts with cold precision, a timeline he couldn’t refute. “It was the night you got back from the Chicago conference. The last week of April. Weeks before you ever mentioned her name. Weeks before you told me our marriage was over.”
The ironclad logic of the dates buckled his knees. The anger, the denial—it all crumbled into dust, leaving only a vast, hollow cavern of shame. He finally voiced the core of his humiliation, the poisoned lie that had allowed all the others to take root.
“She told me,” he choked out, the words tasting like ash. “She said you couldn’t. That we tried and you were…” He couldn’t finish the sentence. He couldn’t say the word barren.
Lyra’s expression softened, not with affection, but with a weary, distant pity. It was worse than hatred.
“And you believed her,” she stated. It was not a question.
That was the moment that shattered him. The realization that Isolde hadn’t just lied about her health or a one-time hospital visit. She had meticulously, patiently, and intimately poisoned him against his own wife. She had taken their private struggles, their quiet heartbreaks, and twisted them into a weapon to assassinate Lyra’s character. And he had held the weapon for her. He had thanked her for it.
He took a stumbling step forward, his hand outstretched in a desperate, pleading gesture. A plea for what, he didn’t know. Forgiveness? A rewind of time?
“Lyra, I’m so sorry…”
For the first time, she reacted. She flinched. A small, almost imperceptible recoil, but it was as definitive as a door slamming shut in his face. She shrank from his touch as if from a hot flame.
The physical rejection was more powerful than any verbal rebuke. It was the final, undeniable proof that the woman he once knew was gone forever. The man she had once loved was a ghost, and the man standing before her now was a stranger she could not, and would not, ever trust again.
He dropped his hand. There was nothing left to say.
He turned and walked out of the room, utterly broken. The confrontation had given him the confirmation he sought, but it had also stripped him of his last defense. He was not a savior. He was a tormentor.
The moment the door closed, Lyra’s composure fractured. A ragged sob escaped her lips, and she collapsed into Zara’s waiting arms.
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