Chapter 5

I came out of the bathroom to the sound of his breathing already gone slow and heavy.

Max was sprawled across the bed, one arm hanging off the edge, mouth slightly open, dead to the world the way only a man with no idea what he's just lost can sleep. I stood in the doorway for a second and watched him, waiting to feel something. Anger. Grief. Anything.

I felt nothing at all.

That scared me more than the anger ever had.

I went back to my own room, technically still ours, but I'd stopped thinking of it that way somewhere around the second night on a concrete floor, and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark.

I hadn't cried in two days.

I hadn't let myself, not really, not since the hospital. There'd been too much to survive in between: the locked room, the slap, the performance of a wife who wanted her marriage back, and grief doesn't wait politely for a convenient moment. It just gets shoved down further and further until you don't know where to find it anymore.

I still hadn't grieved my baby.

The thought hit me sitting there in the dark, and it hollowed me out in a way nothing else had managed to. I hadn't had a single quiet moment to just be sad about it. To miss something that had only existed for eleven happy minutes before it was gone.

I pressed a hand to my stomach.

Empty. Still empty. Maybe it would feel that way for a long time.

I thought about the two years I'd spent loving Max, really loving him, the version of him that used to leave sticky notes on the bathroom mirror and dance with me in the kitchen for no reason at all. I thought about how much of myself I'd handed over to keep that version of him around, and how little of it he'd given back once it stopped being convenient.

I regretted all of it.

Not the way you regret a bad decision you can laugh about later. The way you regret something that cost you pieces of yourself you're not sure you'll ever get back.

I stood up.

I pulled the box down from the top of my closet, the one I'd bought online two nights ago under a fake name, delivered to my mother's address instead of here, because some part of me had already known this moment was coming before I let myself admit it out loud.

I packed slowly at first. Then faster.

Sweaters. The photo of my father I kept on the nightstand. The one necklace Max hadn't picked out for me, the one my grandmother left me, the only piece of jewelry in that whole house that had never once felt like it came with strings attached.

I didn't pack anything he'd given me.

Not the dresses. Not the watch. Not the ring, which I set on his side of the dresser without a note, because there wasn't anything left to say that hadn't already been said through a locked door.

---

I woke up the next morning feeling lighter than I had in months.

It's a strange thing, waking up already free and not having to remember it all over again. I lay there for a second just breathing, testing the feeling out, half expecting the weight to come crashing back down the way it always did.

It didn't.

I reached for my phone.

*I would come pick you up by 2.*

I read it twice, and something in my chest loosened for the first time in days: two o'clock. A number, a time, a plan, something solid to hold onto after weeks of nothing but concrete floors and locked doors and promises that meant nothing.

I smiled at my phone like an idiot.

*That's perfect.*

The morning passed in a strange kind of normal. I showered. I ate. I folded the last of my things into the box with hands that had finally, finally stopped shaking. By the time I left my room, Max was already gone for the day, and I stood in the hallway for a second, genuinely stunned that he hadn't come looking for me.

No knock on my door. No apology waiting outside it. No sign he even remembered what he'd signed the night before.

I should have felt relieved.

Mostly, I just felt tired. Tired of being someone whose absence didn't register until it became inconvenient.

---

I made it down to the kitchen around noon and found Margaret already there, sitting across from Elena, one hand resting on the swell of her stomach like she was checking on something precious.

"You have to take care of yourself," Margaret was saying, soft in a way I'd never once heard her use with me. "You know some people are witches. They could be jealous of things they never get to have."

I stopped in the doorway.

I understood exactly who she meant.

I didn't give her the satisfaction of a reaction. I turned around and walked back the way I came, my pulse hammering in my throat, that word *witch* sitting ugly in my chest the rest of the way up the stairs.

I spent the next two hours in my room, watching the clock crawl toward two o'clock as it owed me something.

At one fifty-eight, I picked up my box.

---

Margaret was at the bottom of the stairs when I came down, arms crossed, watching me descend like she already knew exactly what she was looking at.

"Where are you going?"

I kept my grip steady on the box. "Max and I are divorced."

I didn't wait for whatever came next. I stepped past her, toward the front door, my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears.

"You think you have anywhere better to go?"

I didn't answer her.

I kept walking. Through the front hall, past the console table where Max and I used to drop our keys every night like it meant something, out the front door and into air that felt colder and cleaner than anything inside that house ever had.

A black car sat idling at the curb.

"So you're whoring away, and you finally decide to divorce my son?"

Margaret's voice cracked across the front steps behind me, loud enough that I was sure the neighbors could hear it, loud enough that some old version of me would have stopped and turned around just to defend herself.

I didn't turn around.

I opened the car door, set the box on the seat beside me, and looked straight ahead at the back of a driver's seat instead of at the woman screaming behind me.

"Let's go," I said.

The car pulled away from the curb, and in the side mirror I watched Margaret shrink smaller and smaller on those front steps until the car turned the corner and she disappeared completely.

I let out a breath I felt like I'd been holding for two years.

"You okay?"

The voice from the front seat wasn't the driver's at all.

I looked up, and there he was, turned halfway around in the passenger seat, watching me with an expression I hadn't seen aimed at me in over two years. Careful. Warm. Like he still hadn't quite decided whether I was really sitting there or not.

Nate.

"I don't know," I said honestly, my voice cracking on the last word. "Ask me again once we're far enough away."

He held my gaze a second longer than he needed to, and something about the quiet steadiness in his face made the tears I'd been holding back for two days finally break loose.

He didn't reach for me. Didn't ask me to explain. He just turned back around, told the driver an address, and let me cry in the backseat of a car pulling further and further away from the only life I'd known for the last two years.

For the first time since I woke up in that hospital bed, I finally let myself grieve.