Page 49 of The Yoga Teacher

Daniel flinched.

“Your father replaces women to avoid facing himself,” she continued. “And you—” She lifted her glass. “You cheated on the one person who actually saw you.”

“I’m not like him,” Daniel said quickly. Too quickly.

Her mouth curved, not quite a smile. “No? Then why are you here?”

His hands trembled against the glass. He set it down.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I thought I could outrun becoming him and now—now I’m not sure I didn’t run in a fucking circle.”

She watched him. Measured. “You didn’t leave her. But you replaced her just the same.”

Daniel didn’t argue.

What was there to say?

He looked down at his hands. The same hands that had once lifted Hannah’s face like she was made of starlight. The same hands that had held her when she was sick. Braided her hair once, terribly. Pressed against the small of her back while they danced in the kitchen.

And now? They were the hands of a man she couldn’t stand to touch.

“I don’t deserve her,” he said, quietly.

Isabella didn’t nod. Didn’t reassure him. She just let the silence stretch.

Then, finally, she leaned forward and said the one thing he hadn’t been ready to ask himself.

“So what are you going to do about it?”

Daniel didn’t answer.

Because right now?

He didn’t know.

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Daniel didn’t remember driving home.

He barely remembered pulling into the driveway, shutting off the engine, or unlocking the door. He stood in the middle of the living room like a man who had wandered into someone else’s house by mistake.

It was too quiet.

The house still held her scent in the corners—lavender and lemon, something warm and clean that used to wrap around him like a second skin. Now it clung like a ghost.

He walked to the kitchen in a daze, opened a cabinet, then closed it again. He wasn’t hungry. He didn’t know what he was.

He dropped into a chair and put his head in his hands.

Isabella’s voice still rang in his ears.

"You’re just like your father."

It had been a slap. A diagnosis. A prophecy fulfilled.

Daniel had spent his whole life trying to unwrite the man who raised him. And somewhere along the way, he had traced his footsteps anyway—every selfish impulse, every cowardly excuse. He’d just… dressed it better. Told himself he was different because he cried about it afterward.

But Hannah didn’t need a man who wept after hurting her.

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