Paige continued.
“I believed some of it because she’s my sister.”
Andre nodded.
“That makes sense.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“It does.”
“She was crying.”
Paige looked toward him.
“And you never defended yourself.”
Andre almost smiled.
“Against whom?”
“All of us.”
“You had already decided.”
Paige flinched because it was true.
Andre sat across from her.
“What changed your mind?”
Paige hesitated.
“I had eyes.”
That answer stayed with him.
She remembered family dinners where Andre cooked while Vanessa spent the evening answering messages. She remembered him leaving work early because Amara was sick while Vanessa still went to a networking event. She remembered sitting beside Andre at Christmas one year while Vanessa barely spoke to him because they had argued in the car.
At the time, Paige categorized each moment separately.
After the divorce, she started comparing them.
“I don’t think Vanessa lied about being unhappy,” Paige said. Andre nodded. “She was unhappy.”
“But she lied about why.”
Andre stared at the table.
That distinction mattered.
He had never believed Vanessa fabricated every feeling. Their marriage truly had become unhappy. Andre had made mistakes too, especially toward the end when exhaustion turned him into a man who sometimes withdrew instead of continuing arguments he believed would never resolve.
But that was different from being the husband Vanessa described.
“I saw you trying,” Paige said.
Andre looked up.
Those four words hurt more than he expected.
For years, one private fear had followed him everywhere: maybe Vanessa’s version had been correct. Maybe he had imagined his effort because admitting failure was too painful. Hearing somebody who had been inside the family say otherwise did not erase the divorce, but it loosened something Andre had been carrying alone.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
Paige looked toward her hands.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Of Vanessa?”
“Of choosing wrong.”
Andre understood.
Family loyalty rarely asks people to become dishonest directly. It simply makes neutrality feel safer than saying something that might upset the person closest to you. Paige had chosen silence.
Andre had too.
“Maybe we both got good at that,” he said.
Paige looked up.
“What?”
“Staying quiet because speaking felt expensive.”
She nodded slowly.
The following week became strangely ordinary.
Paige stayed in the guest room while figuring out what to do about Trevor, and Andre helped her contact a tenant-rights attorney who explained that Trevor could not legally keep her belongings simply because the lease was primarily in his name. She recovered her clothes, personal documents, grandmother’s jewelry, laptop, and several boxes with a police standby present. Trevor avoided seeing her.
Paige found temporary work at a neighborhood café while applying for jobs in graphic design. She had worked for a small creative agency before moving in with Trevor, but she reduced her hours because his job required frequent travel and he complained their schedules never aligned. Eventually she stopped working almost entirely.
Andre recognized the pattern without saying so.