My husband invited his ex to our housewarming and …

It was perfect.

Derek appeared at my new apartment two weeks later with flowers.

I saw him through the peephole first.

Standing in the hallway in a charcoal coat, hair styled, bouquet in hand, expression tuned carefully to contrition. For one strange second, I had the impulse to hide, as if he still had the power to define the air in my home.

Then I remembered whose hallway it was.

I opened the door but kept the chain on.

“Maya,” he said, trying a small smile. “Can we talk?”

“What do you need?”

He lifted the flowers a little.

White lilies.

He had once asked my favorite flower and then never remembered the answer.

It was peonies.

“I made a mistake,” he said. “I see that now.”

“Okay.”

He blinked.

“Okay?”

“I appreciate the apology.”

He shifted, thrown by the lack of access.

“Can I come in?”

“No.”

His expression tightened and then smoothed itself again.

“I’ve had time to think. I took you for granted. I pushed too hard. I thought—I don’t know—I thought you trusted me.”

I leaned against the doorframe.

“Trusting you was never the issue.”

“Then what was?”

I looked at him.

Really looked.

Stripped of my wish to be chosen by him, he seemed oddly smaller. Still handsome. Still polished. But I could see the machinery now. The calibration. The way he reached for sincerity like a tool he expected to work.

“You didn’t make a mistake,” I said. “You made a series of choices. You invited your ex to our home without asking me. You used my discomfort as evidence of immaturity. You tried to turn respect into a test I had to pass. That wasn’t one mistake. That was a pattern.”