Prince Caspian -Jung Yoonoh NCT

51. A New Day

I lie in my bed shivering.

I sat in the tub too long, until the water chilled to ice.

Jae, I think, over and over. Jae. Jae. Jae.

I bolt upright.

I have just realized that this incantation of his name is my desperate prayer, my crushed hopes condensed into a single word. When has love descended into obsession? When has he become my drug, my addiction? There are many things I can tolerate, the world is full of scorned wives who go about with their heads held high. But I am not one of them. I cannot, will not tolerate such pitiable needs in myself. I will not become one of those wretched women, wild for the love of their poison, tenderly fuelling their addiction even as it robs them of every last dignity. He was my poison. For him I had abandoned sense and judgment. Without him I could neither eat nor sleep. Even now my mind reaches toward those few moments of all-encompassing happiness I had known with him, as if they still matter, as if they still shine untarnished amid the rubble heaps of my love for him. But how can I free myself from him? I had longed to be married to him, I had dreamt of a lavish affair, where the whole world would know that I am the one he has chosen, above all others.

Thunder booms as a storm rages in the streets outside.

Inside the hotel room, everything is silent and still. Not a single creak comes from the corridor or the room that adjoins mine; the world is on pause, waiting, waiting for what I am about to do next.

My phone sits silent on the side table. He has not called, nor texted me since he walked out the door.

The darkness smothers me. My engagement is over. There will be no marriage. My life has been a complete disaster.

The solution comes with the next flash of lightning.

It is really quite simple.

I have a trust fund. It was provided for me in Grandfather's will. I will lose Ravenscrag, but I will have enough money to live in reasonable comfort for the rest of my life. I can walk away from him, from the wreckage of the greatest and only gamble of my life. Then I can forget that I have been stabbed in the heart, that all I have ever known with him is not love, but a betrayal of the cruellest. I will never, never forgive him. I will walk away, and I will put him, put these - my hurt, my pain, my rage, my disappointment, my revulsion - behind me. Then, and only then, can I be free to breathe again.

But, my treacherous heart, the part that is bleeding tears, cries in agony, No, you can't. You can never leave him. When he smiled at me, I walked on rose petals. When he kissed me, for hours afterward everything tasted of milk and honey. When he made love to me, nothing and no one else existed. The engagement is terminated, and he will marry someone else, another girl will be his wife, bear him the children I had so naively imagined would be mine.

I am sobbing, my tears soaking my pillow. I don't want him to forget me. I will endure his faithlessness, anything to hold on to him. I cannot stand this desperate, snivelling creature; her moans are raw, guttural, anguished; an animal in pain. I love him. I hate both him and myself. I hug my shoulders tight, I rock back and forth, and stare into shadows that will not dispel.

I am still sitting up in bed, my arms wrapped around my knees, when the sunlight pours in through the edges of the curtains in the morning.

A new day has come.

I brush my teeth, and take a shower. I fill the tiny kettle with water, and set it to boil. I make a cup of coffee, and my fingers slip, and the cup drops, and shatters to pieces on a patch of uncarpeted floor. How strange that that part is exposed; I stare at the fragments dully. I catch side of my reflection in the mirror. I look like a ghost. I haven't slept all night. I look strange and strangely vulnerable. The terrible aloneness is exposed, stark and bleak, in the parchment-white, translucent fragility of my face. My eyes are hollow, shadowed pools of pain. This is what he has done to me. This is the girl I have become. This face, these eyes that stare into my soul are those of a woman who has been betrayed, who can never trust again. Gone forever is my innocence, my belief in the goodness of man. And I have no one else to blame. I have done this to myself, with my adoration of him, my delusions, my willingness to risk it all for an illusion conjured by my fevered mind. I turn away from the mirror, and climb back into bed. I wrap my arms about my knees, and resume my rocking. I have a few minutes before I text him to arrange a meeting with him to calmly and rationally discuss the dissolution of our engagement.

But before that, I will permit myself one last indulgence.

I think.

Jae. Jae. Jae. It isn't supposed to end this way. It isn't supposed to end this way.