EmilyTorres79
He has loved her for fourteen years.
Through dinner parties and Sunday lunches and eighteen years of friendship with the man she goes home to. Through Wednesday coffees that started as nothing and became the only part of his week that felt entirely real. Through every smile she placed a half-beat too early and every sleeve pulled down in summer and every time she said fine when she meant something else entirely.
He has never said so.
He has never acted on it.
He has made himself - quietly, steadily, at enormous personal cost - safe ground.
Because Amelia Sutton is surviving.
Her life looks perfect from the outside. The Mosman house. The high-powered job. The partner who is always reasonable, always pleasant, always watching. Dom has never raised his voice. He has never needed to. He has other ways of making himself understood - ways that leave no evidence, that sound like nothing when repeated to someone else, that have taught Amelia, over sixteen years, to make herself smaller and call it fine.
She is not fine.
Marcus knows it. He has been watching the woman he loves disappear by degrees and he has been - because it is the only thing he is allowed to be - safe ground. Present. Steady. The one place she can put the coat down.
When she finally says the thing she has never said out loud to anyone - not really, no, not for quite a long time - he receives it without pressing and asks for nothing in return.
He is waiting for her to find her way back to herself.
She is finding it.
But Dom is always watching.
And he notices everything.
And the ground is shifting under all of them.
* * *
What It Once Was is a slow-burn romance about a woman reclaiming herself and the man who never stopped seeing who she really was.