A Heart That No Longer Aches

Seven years after my divorce from Silas.

We ran into each other in a flower shop.

He was there to buy flowers for his pregnant wife. I was just hiding from the rain.

After a moment of charged silence, we managed to say hello.

Silas asked, politely, how I'd been these past few years.

I answered, just as politely, that everything was fine.

As we were about to part, he said something out of the blue.

"You seem different, Elara."

I just smiled, offering no reply.

The truth is, nothing about me had changed.

I had just stopped loving him.

A damp, cold wind snaked through the gap in the door, and for a long moment, the only sound in the small shop was the relentless drumming of rain against the windowpanes.

The awkward quiet was finally broken when the florist emerged from the back, cradling a bouquet of irises.

"Mr. Vance, you and your wife are so sweet,"she said, beaming.

"Coming all the way out in this weather to buy her flowers."

Silas took the bouquet, his gaze flickering instinctively toward me. He had a habit of over-explaining.

"Faye's been a little emotional during the pregnancy," he murmured.

"The flowers seem to help"

I nodded and offered a few bland compliments.

Seeing the rain outside begin to let up, I picked up my bag, ready to leave. As I reached the door, Silas's hand suddenly shot out and closed around my wrist.

"Where do you live? Let me give you a ride."

"That's not necessary."

I took a half-step back, creating a careful distance between us.

My voice was perfectly steady.

"I wouldn't want your wife to get the wrong idea."

As I turned to walk away, I thought I heard him say something else. The wind was too loud; the words were lost.

The only casualty of the encounter was the breakfast pastry in my bag, now soaked through with rain.

A shame. I tossed the ruined croissant into a nearby trash can without a second thought.

A gust of wind billowed the sleeve of my coat, exposing the faint, silvery scars that lined my wristsouvenirs from a past life. I paused, the thought striking me with a strange lack of emotion.

This was the seventh year since my divorce from Silas.

And the third year since I had truly, finally, let him go.

There was no pang of sadness, none of the hysteria that had defined our separation.

Looking at him had been like looking at a complete stranger.

The rain had stopped. The sky was beginning to clear.

I pulled my sleeve down and headed for the bakery.

Maren, the young woman who helps me out, greeted me with a wide grin.

"Elara, you're here! I found a box when I was cleaning out the storage closet."

She pointed to a dusty cardboard carton in the corner.

"Should I keep it, or toss it with the rest of this junk? I need to make room for the new dough sheeter."

I wiped the layer of dust from the lid.

And there it was, in elegant, looping script: Silas's handwriting.

For Elara.

Maren's interest was immediately piqued.

"Ooh, who's this from?"

she teased.

"Fancy packaging. Somebody was trying to impress you."

She eagerly scanned the box for a signature.

When her eyes landed on the familiar name, she froze. Her voice dropped to a stuttering whisper.

"Silas Vance?"

She looked up at me, her eyes wide.

"Wait, the Silas Vance? The legendary genius, the astrophysicist from MIT?"

Her voice climbed with each question.

"The one who discovered that new asteroid and was in all the magazines? That handsome-as-hell Silas Vance?!"

Maren's gaze was now filled with a kind of bewildered reverence.

"Elara, who are you?"

I lifted the lid of the box.

My voice was calm, a simple statement of fact.

"I'm Silas Vance's ex-wife."

The paranoid, unhinged ex-wife. The one who had a stint in a psychiatric hospital.

The one he considered the greatest shame of his life.

Under Maren's relentless questioning, I finally sat down and told her the story of Silas and me.

When I first met Silas Vance, he wasn't some celebrated boy genius.

He was just the problem child from down the street, the weird, quiet kid everyone in the neighborhood whispered about.

No friends, no family to speak of.

His parents were in the middle of a nasty divorce and treated him like a piece of luggage they were both trying to lose.

The winters in Boston are bone-deep cold.

I found him one evening huddled in the stairwell of our apartment building, shivering in a threadbare sweatshirt.

He looked so lost.

I couldn't just leave him there, so I brought him home.

One day, while we were all playing a board game, my father noticed something incredible about the way Silas's mind worked with numbers.

It was a flash of lightning.

From that day on, everything changed.

My dad saw a spark in him that no one else had, and he fanned it into a flame. At ten, Silas won the National Math Olympiad.

At fourteen, he got early admission to MIT.

By sixteen, a paper he published was making waves across the globe, and awards started piling up.

Suddenly, the same parents who couldn't get rid of him fast enough were fighting tooth and nail for custody.

But Silas did something none of them expected. He knelt before my father and bowed his head, a gesture so formal and final it silenced the room.

"I know who was good to me," he said, his voice thick with emotion.

"I know who really loves me. From now on, you and Mom are my real parents."

He looked at me.

"I'll take care of you both. I'll always take care of Elara."

From that day forward, Silas's trajectory was a straight line pointing up, but he never tried to leave me behind.

When MIT accepted him, he insisted they find a place for me, lobbying for them to lower their admission standards.

When he was offered a teaching position after his doctorate, he demanded they create an administrative role for me in his department.

I was terrified I wouldn't be able to keep up.

But Silas would look at me with that unwavering intensity.

"When I was eight, my parents left me in that stairwell. I sat there all night, from dusk till dawn. You were the one who found me, Elara. You brought me home. I swore to myself in that moment that I would never, ever leave you. I wouldn't be who I am today without you. No matter how high I fly, I will never let you go."

That was Silas.

Stubborn to his core. Once he fixed on something, he never let go.

It was true for his research projects.

It was true when he pursued me.

And, it turned out, it was true when he fell for someone else.

"He cheated?"

Maren's eyes were wide with disbelief.

"But you guys were childhood sweethearts. You grew up together. After all that, he cheated?"

She leaned forward.

"Who was she? Some rich heiress? A supermodel? One of those scheming, femme fatale types you see in the movies?"

None of the above.

Silas's affair was with a dark and wiry, entirely unremarkable girl who sold flowers from a cart at the farmer's market.

By the time he was twenty-seven, Silas had achieved more professionally than most people do in a lifetime. He was no longer chasing accolades or money.

He started pouring his energy into personal hobbies.

He had no interest in stocks or golf or any of the usual pastimes.

Instead, he developed a sudden, all-consuming passion for botany.

Exotic imports, cheap annuals, common daisies, rare orchidsSilas bought them all, filling a small greenhouse he'd built behind our house.

His favorite, he always said, was the iris.

The same type I had given him as a seedling for his birthday years ago.

"This is the plant that started it all," he told me once, his eyes gleaming.

"To think that such an unremarkable seed, with the right human intervention, can be cultivated into something so magnificent. The process it's fascinating."

He said he loved flowers.

But what he loved more was the process of making them bloom.

In that small, glass-walled world, he was God.

He decided what flourished and what withered. Life and death were entirely up to him.

I never really understood what he meant.

A flower was a flower.

It bloomed when it bloomed. Why try to control it so much?

But Faye, the flower girl who was helping him unload a shipment of soil that day, looked up at him with wide, adoring eyes.

"Professor Vance is right," she said, her voice breathy with awe.

"I feel the same way. A flower's beauty depends entirely on the gardener's care. Look how well this iris grew. That was all my work."

And just like that, on a crisp autumn day surrounded by blooming irises, they connected.

Because of the flowers.

And because of me.

After that, Silas started ordering flowers from Faye all the time. Roses, lilies, lilacs, peonies.

The house we lived in began to look less like a home and more like a botanical garden.

And as the flowers accumulated, so did the time they spent together.

Then one day, Silas came to me with a proposal. He wanted to sponsor Faye's education.

"She's just a teenager, Elara. She's brilliant and hardworking. It's a tragedy to let that kind of potential go to waste."

Faye stood beside him, nervously picking at the thick calluses on her hands.

A small, anxious smile played on her chapped lips.

"I'll study hard, I promise," she said, her eyes fixed on me.

"My grades were good. I only had to drop out of school because my mom was in a car accident and I had to support my family. If you just give me a chance, I swear I won't let you down."

Her young face was etched with a weariness that didn't belong on someone her age. Looking into her earnest eyes, I was suddenly reminded of an eight-year-old boy, huddled and helpless in a cold stairwell.

My heart softened.

For a long time, I treated Faye like a younger sister.

I bought her new clothes, taught her about skincare, and helped her navigate the social cues she'd never had a chance to learn.

She called me her big sister, swore I was the kindest person she'd ever met, and promised that one day, she would repay my kindness.

And she didn't disappoint me. She was accepted into the very university where Silas and I both worked.

The night she received her acceptance letter, she climbed into Silas's bed.

I had left work early that day, planning to cook a special dinner to celebrate her achievement.

I walked into our home to find them tangled together in our bedroom, their clothes in a heap on the floor.

In that single, shattering moment, I lost my mind.

I threw the celebratory cake at them, smearing frosting across their bare skin.

I tore through the house like a hurricane, smashing every pot and vase, shredding every petal and leaf until our home was a graveyard of flowers.

Silas shielded Faye with his body, his eyes cold as he watched my rampage.

"That's enough, Elara. Close the door on your way out."

His voice was flat.

"You may not have any shame, but Faye does."

Between me and Faye, his choice was clear and instantaneous.

He had chosen the other woman.

I couldn't breathe. I demanded he give me an explanation.

He just frowned.

"You are still my wife, Elara. As long as you don't make trouble, Faye will never threaten your position."

Faye, for her part, scrambled to her knees in front of me, tears streaming down her face.

"Sister, I know I've wronged you, but Silas and I are in love! We're soulmates. We understand each other in a way no one else can. Don't worry, I'll never forget your kindness. I don't need a title, I won't fight you for anything. Just please, let me stay by his side!"

I was only in my twenties.

I was proud, and I had never known a hurt like this.

I sent a formal complaint to the university, an email detailing their unethical and inappropriate relationship. I wanted to expose them.

But reality delivered a swift, brutal lesson.

The university was never going to fire a star like Silas Vance. Instead, to appease him, they put me on disciplinary probation.

Silas then went a step further, releasing a public statement to the faculty, asking his colleagues to look out for Faye.

"She is my student," he wrote.

"She is brilliant, diligent, and hardworking. I hope you will all, for my sake, give her the support she deserves. She has overcome immense hardship to get here. She may not have the most polished academic record, but in my eyes, she is the finest student I have ever had the privilege of teaching. She is my greatest pride."

He even admitted to pulling strings to get her into the university, acknowledging it was against the rules.

He didn't care. All he wanted was to ensure Faye had a brilliant future.

And me?

What was I?

A joke?

A footnote?