HER HIM PAIN
CHAPTER 1 — "I Shouldn't Be Here"
She shouldn't have come back.
That was the first thought she had when she parked across the street from his house.
But her hands were already on the wheel.
Her body was already sitting there.
And her heart… had never really left.
The night was quiet in a way that made everything louder.
Streetlights humming. Tires in the distance. A world that kept moving like nothing important was happening.
But inside her car, everything was still.
She stared at the house.
Warm lights glowing through the front window.
A life that used to include her.
Now it didn't.
Through the glass, she saw him.
Laughing.
Standing close to his wife like she belonged there the way she once did.
And when he leaned in and kissed her—soft, natural, effortless—
something inside her didn't just hurt.
It collapsed.
She didn't move.
Didn't blink.
Just watched like her body forgot how to interrupt what her eyes were seeing.
Her hand slowly dropped to her lap.
The pregnancy test was still there.
Already used.
Already real.
Two lines she had stared at earlier in a bathroom that suddenly felt like a different lifetime.
Positive.
A truth she couldn't argue with, couldn't undo, couldn't escape.
She pressed her forehead against the steering wheel for a second, breathing shallow.
Not crying.
Not yet.
Just trying to understand how life could keep going inside her while everything outside her was falling apart.
Her other hand rested on something heavier.
A pistol.
Cold metal.
Familiar weight.
Her father's.
He used to say, "As long as I'm alive, nobody touches you. And if I'm not… you make sure they still can't."
Five years ago, he died in a car crash.
Since then, the world hadn't felt the same.
Neither had she.
The gun wasn't comfort.
It was memory.
Protection from a man who wasn't here anymore to protect anything.
She looked back at the house.
Him and his wife moved around like nothing in the world could reach them.
Like nobody was outside watching a life she used to be part of.
Like she didn't exist anymore.
Her throat tightened.
She whispered to herself, barely audible:
"So this is what peace looks like…"
Her phone buzzed on the seat.
She ignored it.
Nothing mattered in that moment except the window.
Him.
Happy.
Gone from her life completely… but still alive enough to give everything she ever wanted to someone else.
She lifted the pregnancy test again.
Looked at it like it belonged to another version of her.
A version that still believed love meant something permanent.
Now she knew better.
Love didn't always end in endings.
Sometimes it just… continued without you.
Inside the house, they laughed again.
And that sound—
that normal, effortless sound—
hit her harder than anything else.
Because she realized something sitting there in the dark:
He wasn't suffering.
He wasn't confused.
He wasn't looking back.
She was the only one still stuck in the past.
Her fingers tightened around the steering wheel.
Not from fear.
From choice.
From the moment she finally understood there was nothing left to wait for.
No version of him coming back.
No version of her being chosen.
Only this.
She leaned back in her seat, eyes locked on the house, and whispered:
"I didn't come here to fix anything…"
A pause.
"I came here to accept it."
And as she sat there watching him live a life without her…
something inside her quietly decided—
this was no longer just pain.
This was the beginning of what she would do with it.