In that time if I was a song writer like Taylor swift or Olivia Rodrigo I would have released probably eighty to ninety songs about betrayal and heartbreaking. I'd held onto the house for some twisted reason, knowing that bringing another woman there would be the nail in her coffin. I'm still not sure how I knew that seeing as she'd disappeared without a trace. But somewhere deep inside, I knew that the love she'd had for that place had been real, and being a damn female, the thought of another woman being in the place she'd seen as hers would gut her.
I couldn't leave it as it had been, though, fuck no. Each time I walked through the door and saw the evidence of her touch, I'd wanted to commit murder. So I'd hired someone to gut the place from top to bottom and remove all the frill shit she'd been into, turning it into a more modern state of the art home. I hated it, her designs had been more suited to the place, but I was killing her with each piece I removed and replaced. At least in my mind, I was.
I'd taken on more work, traveled more and more to get away, to keep my mind occupied so that it wasn't filled with her. The one time I tried to fuck someone else had been a disaster and had made me hate her even more than I already did. And then the thought of her in someone else's arms had turned me into a complete fucking monster.
I'd gone on a tear that had lasted months, something only my mother had been able to bring me back from. But I barely paid her any mind even then, since she was the only one who still sided with my ex-wife. Of everyone around me, it was only my mother who insisted that Diana hadn't left me on her own, that she hadn't deceived me all those months we were together.
Everyone else agreed with me that she was a gold-digging slut who deserved to have her throat slit and left in a gutter to bleed out. Something I'd sworn I'd do if I'd seen her in those first few days after she left. It didn't matter that she hadn't taken anything when she left, that even the account I'd opened for her had gone untouched all this time.