Page 159 of The Yoga Teacher

He’d been ready to confess. To crawl. To tell her everything: how his father had gutted him one conversation at a time. How thirty had loomed like a guillotine. How every glance from someone younger felt like proof that he was slipping away, becoming nothing.

But none of that mattered.

Not after the way she looked at him.

Not after the way shedidn’t look away.

His mouth was dry.

His skin felt too tight.

And still—beneath all the shame, all the grief, all the wreckage—something stayed alive inside him.

A terrible, hungry hope.

Because she had come. She had sat beside him. She had looked him in the eye and asked why.

Not to forgive him.

Not to fix him.

But to understand.

That was something.

And that—God help him—was everything.

He thought about the life she described. The slow one. The creaky one. Matching pill organizers. Lazy Sunday fights over the thermostat. A life not about thrill, but about trust.

He had thrown that away.

He had fucking incinerated it.

And now, all he could do was show up. Sit in the ash.

Because that’s what she’d asked for.

And Hannah—Hannah was still the only thing he knew how to follow.

CHAPTER SIXTY

Hannah

THE GYM WAS nearly empty. Just the echo of her breath, the clink of metal, and the low hum of the lights overhead.

Hannah stood in front of the barbell, chalk dust still on her hands, sweat cooling along her spine. The mirror in front of her reflected a woman who didn’t look wrecked. Didn’t look unraveling.

But her heart was still somewhere in that office.

That soft-couched room where she’d spoken more truth in forty-five minutes than she had in the last four months combined.

Daniel hadn’t tried to refute anything. Hadn’t deflected. He’d justsat there, mouth slack with shame.

She’d hated how much she wanted him to fight. To argue. Toreach.

Her fingers curled tighter around the bar.

She thought of the divorce papers.

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