The Triple Betrayal: He Cheated With My Best Friend So I Left Chapter 07
Six months went by in a blink. A full year now since I’d left.
Julian and Ivy saw less and less of each other, and every time they did meet, the air between them was thick with tension.
One night over dinner at a restaurant, Ivy leaned across the table, her eyes red and accusing.
“Since Nora left, you won’t even look at me. You’ve never let her go, have you?”
Julian rubbed his temple, his voice strained.
“Just drop it, Ivy. Stop bringing this up over and over.”
Dinner ended badly.
A few days later, Julian went out drinking with some old friends, and the alcohol wore down whatever he’d been holding back.
Head down, voice low, he admitted it.
“I owe Nora an apology I’ll never get to say.”
The friend across from him sighed into his glass. “What’s the use in saying it now? You made your choice.”
Not long after, Ivy went out drinking with friends of her own and got completely wasted.
She grabbed the arm of the person next to her, crying hysterically.
“I gave up a child for him. I might never be able to have one again. And he still can’t stop thinking about her.”
One of her friends, unable to keep it to themselves, repeated the whole thing to Julian word for word.
Julian’s face went cold. “She chose to do that herself. I never forced her.”
That bit of gossip lit the fuse on everything they’d both been suppressing.
The next day, Ivy showed up at his door, and the two of them had their first real fight since they’d known each other.
Ivy’s voice escalated into a shriek.
“Nora’s fragility was always an act! If she really loved you, she wouldn’t have walked away that easily.”
“And you—you didn’t know what you had until it was gone, and now you’re sitting here playing the martyr. What’s the point?”
For the first time, Julian pushed back, his voice dropping low enough to be frightening.
“She didn’t love me? After her mother died, I was the only thing holding her world together.”
“You knew that, and you still wedged yourself between us. And you have the gall to act like the victim?”
Ivy started shaking.
She grabbed her bag off the couch and slammed the door hard enough to shake the frame on her way out.
Julian stood alone in the apartment.
His eyes landed on the three matching mugs still sitting on the coffee table.
Ivy’s orange one stood out against the others, garish and wrong.
He swept his arm across the table.
The ceramic shattered against the floor, the sound cracking through the silence of the empty apartment, pieces scattering everywhere.
…
On the other side of the world, I kept steadily working through therapy.
In my spare time, I studied psychology and passed the licensing exam to become a counselor.
My first independent client was a young woman who’d left an abusive relationship after years of it—finally, decisively.
After she finished telling me everything, I stood and gave her a light hug.
“Leaving the wrong person is how you start living again.”
That night, back at Aunt Rachel’s, I took out the small framed photo of my mother I always carried with me.
I traced the edge of the frame with my thumb and shared a quiet word with her.
“Mom, I’m doing something that matters now. I can help people who’ve been hurt the way we were.”
Back home, Julian quit his stable job entirely and bought an open-ended ticket, drifting from city to city with no destination in mind.
His phone’s lock screen was still the photo he’d taken of me sleeping, years ago, without my knowing.
Wherever he ended up, whatever hotel he checked into, he’d pull up that photo before sleep and stare at it for a long time.