CHAPTER 4 - THE DIVORCE PAPERS

I slept in my car outside a gas station because I didn't know where else to go.

The seatbelt buckle dug into my hip every time I shifted. Every hour or so I woke up certain my phone had rung, and every time it hadn't. Just my own pulse, loud enough to fool me.

By morning my mouth tasted like metal, and my back had locked into a shape that wasn't mine. I drove to the house anyway, because some stupid, stubborn part of me still believed doors could open twice.

The housekeeper let me in without a word, her grip tight on the door handle a beat too long after I'd already passed through.

She already knew.

Jack was in the study. Coffee in hand. Dressed for work like today was a normal Tuesday and not the morning after.

"Can we talk? Alone."

He glanced past me, checking for Beatrice, for Georgina, for anyone who might make this harder for him. Finding no one, he nodded once.

"I can forgive it," I said, before he could sit down, before he could build a wall out of silence. "The affair. Georgina. Whatever happened before last night, whatever's been happening for months. I don't care anymore. I just want my marriage back."

"You don't mean that."

"I do."

"You're saying it because you're scared."

"Maybe. So what? Being scared doesn't make it a lie."

He set the coffee down without drinking it, and that small, careful motion told me more than his face did.

"Do you remember our wedding?" I pressed on. "You cried during your vows. Everyone laughed because you tried to hide it and couldn't hide it at all."

"Lauren."

"You held my hand at my father's funeral. You didn't let go for six hours. I remember because my fingers went numb and I never once asked you to move."

"That was a different life."

"It was four years ago."

"It feels like a different life." He finally looked at me, and there was something almost like grief in it, gone as fast as it came. "The woman I married doesn't exist anymore, Lauren. You disappeared somewhere between the diagnosis and now, and I don't know how to find her."

"I'm right here."

"You're not. Not the way you were."

"So find a new way to look at me. That's what marriage is supposed to survive."

"Not everyone's built to survive it."

"You promised me you were."

He didn't answer that either.

"Because I got sick." My voice cracked on the word, and I hated it, hated that he got to see it crack. "You don't divorce someone for getting sick, Jack. You don't just decide the version of her that's inconvenient gets erased."

He didn't answer that. The front door opened before he had to.

A man in a grey suit walked in without knocking. Folder under his arm. He didn't look surprised to see me — which meant he'd been told I might be here. Which meant this was planned further than I wanted to understand yet.

"Mr Roland. Documents are ready for your signature."

"What documents?"

Jack went very still, coffee cup halfway back to the desk, like moving might make this more real than it already was. The lawyer set the folder down and opened it the way you open something you've opened a hundred times before, for a hundred other marriages that ended exactly this way.

"When was this prepared?" I asked.

The lawyer's grip tightened on the folder's edge. "I'd have to check the file."

"Check it now."

"Lauren, don't."

"I asked a simple question."

Nobody answered it.

The silence answered it instead, and I understood, standing there, that this was never a conversation. It was a formality I'd walked into by accident.

The lawyer cleared his throat and shuffled the papers just to have something to do with his hands.

"Wait until I finish treatment," I said. "That's all I'm asking."

"I can't do that."

"You mean you won't."

"I mean it's already done."

"Do you understand what you're asking me to sign? You're asking a woman who might not survive this year to sign away the only family she has left."

"Your illness isn't my responsibility anymore." He said it flat, like a fact he'd already made peace with. "It hasn't been for a while."

"So when did you decide that? Was there a date? Did you write it down somewhere — the exact moment I stopped being your problem?"

He didn't answer that.

My hand shook so badly the pen skidded across the first line. I pressed down harder the second time and got it right.

I set the pen down.

Nobody said congratulations. Nobody said anything at all.

As I gathered my copy, my eyes caught the date stamped in the corner of the first page.

Four days ago.

I read it twice, certain I'd made a mistake.

I hadn't.

Four days ago, I was still in that hospital bed believing my husband was simply too busy to answer his phone.

I looked up at Jack. He didn't look away this time.

He didn't deny it either.

He knew. Before I ever walked through that bedroom door and found him with Georgina, he had already decided I was leaving.

The affair wasn't the reason.

It was the excuse.

And as I walked out of that house for the second time in twelve hours, one question followed me down every step of the driveway. Louder than anything Beatrice said. Louder than the lock turning last night.

What happened to the man who once cried at his own wedding  that made him so certain I deserved to be thrown away?