The Year I Stopped Being His novel Chapter 533

It wasn't just a handful of fragmented images. It wasn't the fabricated fairy tale he had fed her. It was everything.

Their marriage. The cold, suffocating indifference he had subjected her to for years. The deliberate distance he had maintained.

He had stood beside his mother in complete silence, watching Rosemary Hayes rip Archie from Sloane's arms while she begged on her knees.

When she was dying, she had traveled thousands of miles to Switzerland to find him, only to see him acting intimately with another woman...

Piece by piece, memory by memory—every single atrocity he believed was safely buried beneath her amnesia had been violently unearthed in that single moment.

It was like a stack of gruesome photographs thrown into the harsh sunlight, every single one blindingly clear.

Garrison slowly lowered his right hand to his side, his fingers curling into a tight fist until his nails dug into his palm, but he didn't feel the pain.

The only thing he felt was a dull, crushing agony radiating through his chest, as if his heart was being fed through a meat grinder.

He took a ragged breath, turned around, and saw Archie still standing under the ginkgo tree.

The small boy was perfectly still, his backpack sitting squarely on his shoulders. Those clear, unreadable eyes watched him through the gaps in the moving traffic.

Garrison walked back across the street and dropped to one knee in front of his son.

He opened his mouth, desperately wanting to say something—an explanation, an apology. But before he could even form the words, Archie spoke first.

"Dad. Let's go home."

Garrison froze.