The Stranger I Married
Chapter 100: Guilt

Chapter 100: Guilt

James Marquez sat in his car, staring through the windshield, not seeing anything.

The café was behind him now. The bitter taste of Ella’s words still lingered like ash on his tongue. He could still hear her voice—cutting and clear, so much fire packed into such a small, trembling frame.

She didn’t flinch.

Not once.

Not when he used her name like it was still his to use. Not when he offered her peace laced with manipulation. Not when he tried to play the father card, or the businessman card, or whatever pathetic hybrid he’d turned into after everything fell apart.

She hadn’t just changed—she had grown teeth.

And all James could do now was sit in the driver’s seat and remember what it was like when she still looked at him like he mattered.

She was seven the first time she ever called him James.

He’d come home late—another fight with her mother, another lie he’d spun to cover up the money he had borrowed, or the woman he had been texting behind closed doors.

Ella had been sitting on the top step in her pajamas, a stuffed animal clutched tight to her chest. Her face was blotchy from crying, her little knees pulled into her chest like a shield.

"You missed dinner," she’d said, voice too flat for a child.

He had been drunk enough to dismiss it.

"Go to bed, El."

But she hadn’t moved.

She’d just looked at him with those huge, heartbroken eyes and said, "Okay... James."

Something in him had cracked, then. The way she’d said it—deliberate and distant, like she was putting space between them even at seven years old.

He remembered laughing, like it was some kind of joke.

She hadn’t laughed. Just gotten up, walked past him in silence, and gone back to her room.

It was always easier to pretend he was the victim.

That Margaret had been too cold. That Ella had always taken her mother’s side. That they hadn’t understood the pressure he was under. The job he lost. The debt he never told them about.

When Margaret slipped into a coma, he had genuinely believed the grief would crush him.

But it didn’t.

It was guilt that did.

And guilt... made a man selfish. Reckless. Weak.

He’d told himself it wasn’t abandonment. That moving on was the only way to keep surviving. That a nineteen year old girl was better off with structure and distance than with a father crumbling into pieces in front of her.

He remembered the way Ella screamed at him the day he told her he was remarrying.

"You don’t even know her!" she’d yelled, tears making her face a streaked mess of fury. "She hates Mom! She talks about her like she’s already dead."

"She is gone, Ella," he had snapped. "You have to grow up and accept that."

"You’re the one who needs to grow up," she’d spat, voice shaking. "You left Mom the second she couldn’t look after youanymore."

It was the last time she had spoken to him before packing a small duffel and going to stay with a friend. She hadn’t even said goodbye.

And James, like the coward he was, had let her go.

He told himself she’d come back when she cooled off. That she needed space. That she’d understand, one day.

She didn’t come back.

And he didn’t chase her.

He hadn’t expected her to become someone.

In his mind, she was always the girl on the stairs. Fragile. Too sensitive. Too much like Margaret. Always watching, always remembering. Always one emotional blow away from shattering.

But he’d been wrong.

She didn’t shatter—she sharpened.

He’d seen her with Nicholas Carter at the gala . There had been something about the way Carter looked at her—possessive, yes, but protective, too. Like she was something rare he refused to let the world bruise.

Nicholas Carter wasn’t just rich—he was dangerous. Strategic. The kind of man who didn’t suffer fools or surround himself with liabilities. If he’d chosen Ella, it meant something.

James couldn’t say why it felt like a slap.

Maybe because someone else had seen value in her. Because someone else had stayed.

And it wasn’t him.

He told himself the meeting at the café was just closure. An attempt to make peace. Maybe open the door a little, enough to be part of her life again.

But the truth sat heavy in his chest.

He had hoped for access. Not just to Ella—but to the world she now belonged to.

Carter’s world.

And that shame curled hot in his gut like acid.

Because she saw through him in five minutes.

He hadn’t expected her to be that clear-eyed. That certain.

He hadn’t expected her to cut him out so cleanly, like she had been preparing for that moment her whole life.

Maybe she had.

Maybe every cold night in an empty apartment. Every panic over bills she shouldn’t have had to pay. Every time she’d begged him to help settle her mom’s bill and he hadn’t even answered the phone.

Maybe every one of those things had been another stitch in the armor she now wore like second skin.

She was no longer a little girl begging for his love.

She was a woman.

A woman who had survived him.

James leaned back in his seat and covered his face with one hand, exhaling a breath that trembled despite himself.

The worst part wasn’t the rejection.

It was the realization that he didn’t even deserve to be angry about it.

He wasn’t entitled to her forgiveness. Or her life. Or the quiet peace she’d found in someone else’s arms.

He had made himself a stranger. And now he would remain one.

Because Ella no longer needed him.

She had built a home out of scar tissue, found love in the rubble he left behind, and she wasn’t offering him a key.

She was shutting the door.

And for once, James couldn’t blame her.

He could only sit in the silence, replaying the sound of her voice in his head—the strength in it, the finality—and wonder what kind of man he might’ve been if he’d stayed.

If he hadn’t let fear win.

If he had chosen her. Chosen to love her, even when it was hard.

Even when it cost something.

But he hadn’t.

And now... he’d lost her.

Maybe forever.

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