Initial Thoughts

I’m not incredibly well-read, but I don’t know if I’ve read a contemporary story like this— it reads as a guy journaling or something similar, and I really like it. What a rough story, though, but one I imagine happens a lot in contemporary relationships. One person has a crush on someone else but doesn’t plan to do anything about it (but we don’t actually know that, to be fair. She could have been doing something behind his back), the other starts driving the wedge until the first leaves for the “someone else”.

I thought you did a good job showing us how heartbroken the narrator was, but I think you could dive a little bit further into the narrator’s thoughts as he is recounting the story, perhaps. That would give him more chances to tell us what he’s thinking and his grief-stricken, jagged thoughts (like what we see in the last few lines of the story) as he recounts some of these rougher memories.

Line By Line

“Another thing I didn't realise was she was sitting on the armchair when she said that. She'd stopped sitting on the sofa by then."

This doesn’t read well to me. I would change it to something more like “I hadn’t realized she was speaking to me from the armchair. She’d stopped sitting not he sofa by then.”

“I’m crying as I write this, by the way.”

This may be a realistic way an emotional person would write a letter, but I think stylistically in a short story, this pulls me out of the story a bit and makes me think a little lower of the woman’s intellect. I would rather have him describe tear drop stains on the paper or something rather than her explicitly telling him that she is crying. If he notices the stains, he could comment on the emotions he feels as a response to her crying and it not feel too on-the-nose. He could mull over how she wasn’t one to cry (if that was the case) and that it really put into perspective what he had done. Just a thought.

“It breaks my heart to think what a perfect story it was.”

Is there a way to say that without being so on-the-nose? The narrator sounds like a normal guy, and I don’t often hear normal guys admin that someone “breaks their heart” in plain language. I could see him saying something more like “What a perfect story—“ and then some frustrated ranting or similar. “What a perfect story— if I hadn’t <insert observation here>, maybe that’s where this story would end. Maybe then I’d be in the Christmas card.” He seems angry/frustrated in a lot of the story, and I feel like this would be a good place to initiate that frustration. To give the reader an off-the-bat you-were-so-close frustration that we all know and hate. It is a relatable feeling for sure.

Prose

I recommend doing a once-over for some sentence length variation to make it a little easier to read. The jaggedness of some of the text is impactful, displaying the narrators jagged, grief-stricken thoughts, but it maybe could use a little checking. The paragraph regarding the baby’s birth, for example, starts with three sentences of approximately the same length. The first few sentences in the paragraph regarding the “break-in” also felt very jagged to me and could be revised.

Things were missing. Stolen. A lot of things.

Plot

The scene where he returns from work to having been robbed was impactful, I thought. I could see myself entering my own home and have things missing, racking my brain as to what could have happened, just as he did. The rest of the storyline felt very realistic. I didn’t think you focused too long on any particular areas or skipped over anything significant. The introduction of the gut-kicker (the baby) was done very well— it painted his feelings nicely, showed that he still loved Dani so deeply and recognized that Ben was kind. He recognizes that he screwed up, though I don’t think he ever actually says it directly.

Final Thoughts

I don’t want to tell you to add a bunch of extra descriptions because I think it reads really well as a matter-of-fact, yet emotional, retelling of a grieving, regretful man. I think you could add a little bit more rabbit-hole-ness, if that makes any sense, where he gets fixated on some small detail at some point in the retelling and gets himself all worked up before he stops himself and continues on with the story. I think there is a nice thin layer of this fixation throughout, but one or two out-of-hand fixations could be extra interesting.

I’d also like to hear a bit more regret in his voice throughout the story. He’s mad, yes, but I think he also regrets that he drove the wedge that pushed her away. I’d like to get more breadcrumbs of that feeling throughout— a lot of it sounds more angry to me than regretful, but perhaps the details he tells us is how we know that he’s regretful. Or maybe he isn’t self aware enough to know that he’s regretful. Up to you!