CHAPTER TWO: Divorce And A Key

Emma's POV 

I do not sleep.

I lie in that bed and do what I have quietly mastered over fourteen months, which is existing in complete stillness while approximately nine thousand things happen loudly inside my chest, and I stare at the ceiling and I think about heels on my hardwood floor and a tap running and a laugh I was not supposed to hear.

At six forty-three I get up because lying there has a poor return on investment and I learned that lesson around month four.

The apartment looks exactly as it always looks in the morning. Beautiful. Expensive. About as welcoming as a waiting room for people too rich to wait for anything. I put the kettle on and stand at the counter and think, not for the first time, about what it would feel like to stand in a kitchen that is actually mine.

Footsteps.

Liam walks in already dressed. Jacket on. The version of himself he presents to the world. He goes to the coffee machine, which has his order memorized, pours a cup, and stands at the counter with his phone face down in the specific way that means he has something to say and has already decided how.

I wait.

I am good at waiting.

"I want a divorce, Emma."

He says it with the tone he uses for I'll be late tonight. Clean. Flat. Premeditated. I stand at the counter with my tea in both hands and let those five words find where they are going to land.

Below my ribs. Right of center.

I breathe through it.

"Okay," I reply.

He blinks. Very small. The slight repositioning of a man who prepared for several responses and okay is not among them.

"My lawyer will be in touch this week."

"Fine."

"The settlement is straightforward."

"I'm sure."

He looks at me, searching for something. The tears. The argument. The please don't. He finds none of it and picks up his phone and his coffee.

"I'll stay at the Ritz while you sort your things," he says from the hallway.

"Generous," I reply.

The front door opens.

Closes.

I stand in the echo of the most significant conversation I have apparently had in fourteen months and I look at my tea.

Then I sit down on the kitchen floor.

Not dramatically. Not collapsing. I sit because standing requires a cooperation my legs cannot spare and the floor is cool and solid and has absolutely no opinions about me.

Four minutes.

Then I get up and start packing.

---

I am methodical about it. One drawer at a time. The systematic work of dismantling a life, which turns out to be less complicated than building one because building requires hope and dismantling only requires boxes.

I am forty minutes in when I pull a jacket of Liam's from the back of the closet, left on my side by accident months ago, and something falls from the inside pocket onto the floor between my feet.

A receipt.

Folded twice. Soft at the creases from being handled and returned to the same pocket repeatedly.

I unfold it.

Hotel Beaumont, New York City. Suite 412. Three nights.

The dates are from four months into our marriage.

I know these dates. I remember Liam telling me it was a solo conference, two days, back Thursday. I remember eating dinner alone and telling myself the distance was professional and the absence was temporary and I simply needed to be patient.

The receipt says three nights.

It says double occupancy.

I set it on the nightstand and go back to packing because I am methodical and I have committed to this.

I start on the bookshelf twenty minutes later.

I am reaching for the last row when something slides out from between two spines and falls to the floor.

A photograph.

Printed. Not digital. The kind that exists because someone wanted to remember the moment badly enough to hold it in their hands.

Liam and Talia. A corner restaurant table with candles on it. Neither of them looking at the camera because nobody is performing this for the camera. He is looking at her the way I have spent fourteen months wishing he would look at me. Like she is the most specific and interesting thing in his vicinity.

The date on the back is two months before our wedding.

I set it next to the receipt.

I am almost done with the shelf when I find the third thing.

Behind a row of books he never reads, the decorative ones his interior designer selected because their spines were the right color. A small velvet box, dark green, the kind that comes from a specific type of jeweler on a specific type of street.

I open it.

A bracelet. Delicate. Gold. Chosen with knowledge of the person it was bought for.

There is a card tucked inside the lid.

His handwriting.

For when you don't have to wait anymore.

I read it once.

Read it again.

I close the box and set it next to the receipt and the photograph, and I stand back and look at the three things on the nightstand like evidence at a trial nobody asked me to attend, and I feel something move through me that is not grief and not rage but something colder and cleaner than either.

Clarity.

Four months in, he was in a New York hotel suite with someone who was not his wife.

Two months before the wedding, he was in a restaurant looking at her like she was the only thing in the room.

And sometime between the beginning and this morning, he bought her a bracelet with a card that says for when you don't have to wait anymore.

I have been the waiting.

I have been the thing she was waiting for to be over.

I pick up my phone.

"Mom, I need you to come."

"I'm already getting my keys," she replies, the way she always does. No preamble. No questions. Just I'm already getting my keys, and I feel something in my chest loosen just enough to breathe around.

"Can you stop at a pharmacy on the way?"

A pause.

"How late?" she asks.

I close my eyes.

The receipt. The photograph. The bracelet.

"I barely noticed but it's been weeks."

The silence on her end lasts exactly two seconds.

"I'll stop at two pharmacies," she says.

I hang up and go back to packing.

---

I hear the front door open forty minutes later.

I assume Liam has forgotten something.

"In the bedroom," I call, because I am nothing if not accommodating to the end.

The footsteps are wrong.

Lighter. More deliberate.

I know these footsteps.

I heard them last night on my hardwood floor.

I turn around.

Talia Sinclair is standing in my bedroom doorway in a cream silk blouse and wide-leg trousers and the effortless morning beauty that requires three hours of effort and a personal aesthetician on retainer. She is holding a key.

My key.

His key to this apartment, which she has just used to let herself in on the morning of my divorce while I am still technically a resident.

She slips it into her bag with the casual confidence of someone who has been doing this for considerably longer than this morning and smiles at me with the warm compassionate expression of a woman who has won and is genuinely trying to be gracious about it.

"Emma. I just wanted to check on you."

I look at her.

I look at the three things on the nightstand.

I look back at her.

"How long have you had a key to my apartment?"

A small confused crease appears between her perfectly shaped brows. "Oh, Liam gave me—"

"How long, Talia?"

She shifts into the warm patient expression of someone managing a difficult conversation with great maturity.

"I think what matters right now is that you're okay," she says gently. "This is a hard day and I just want you to know there are no hard feelings on my end."

The room is very quiet.

"No hard feelings," I repeat slowly. "On your end."

"We're going to be in each other's lives," she continues, with the serene certainty of a weather forecast. "Liam and I are together now. And I think it would be so much better for everyone if we could just be..."

"If the next word is civil," I say, "I genuinely need you to stop."

She presses her lips together. Tries a different angle.

"He was never really happy, Emma." Her voice drops into soft and kind and absolutely insufferable. "I think deep down you always knew that. Some people just aren't meant to be..."

"Get out of my bedroom."

Something moves behind her eyes. Not hurt. Recalculation.

"I'm just trying to be mature about..."

"The door," I say. "Please."

She turns.

Heels on hardwood.

Front door.

Gone.

The silence she leaves is enormous.

I stand in the middle of my half-packed life and I look at the three things on the nightstand and then I look at the space in the doorway where she was standing and I think about no hard feelings on her end and for when you don't have to wait anymore and heels on my hardwood floor at twelve forty-three in the morning.

And then, despite everything, I start laughing.

The helpless kind. The significantly less dignified kind.

I laugh until my eyes water and then I wipe my face and I go back to packing.

Fold a sweater.

Put it in the suitcase.

Fold another.

I am nothing if not methodical.