Chapter 3

His pen hit the paper like a fist hitting a wall.

Dimitri signed every page with sharp, angry strokes, his jaw so tight I could see the muscles jumping under his skin. When he finished, he shoved the papers across the table and looked up at me with eyes so cold they could have frozen the IV drip.

"Katya, don't regret divorcing me."

I almost laughed.

Regret? Regret was what I felt for the last four years. Regret was the wasted dinners, the empty bed at 2 AM, the lingerie that never got seen, the anniversary that turned into another night alone. Regret was loving a man who had room in his heart for everyone except his wife.

Signing these papers wasn't regret. It was the first smart thing I had done since saying "I do."

"Be at the County Courthouse tomorrow morning. Nine o'clock."

I picked up the papers, slid them back into my bag, and turned toward the door. Behind me, Misha was still crying, and Dimitri was bouncing him gently, whispering something about being brave and growing up to be a real man.

A real man. Coming from him, that was rich.

I walked out of that hospital room without looking back. Down the hall, into the elevator, through the lobby, and out the front doors into the cold night air. My hands were shaking, but my heart was steady. For the first time in two years, something inside me felt quiet. Not happy. Not sad. Just quiet.

The two years of emotional torture played behind my eyes like a movie I couldn't turn off. Every time Anya called, Dimitri jumped. Every time Misha sneezed, Dimitri disappeared. Every holiday, every birthday, every weekend, she had a claim on him that I could never compete with, because her claim came wrapped in grief and guilt and the name of a dead man.

And I loved him through all of it. That was the pathetic part. I loved him while he chose her, again and again and again, and I kept thinking that if I was just patient enough, understanding enough, good enough, he would finally see me.

He never did.

I drove to the nearest liquor store, bought a bottle of red wine, and went home to our empty apartment. I poured myself a glass, then threw the glass in the sink and drank straight from the bottle.

"To freedom." I raised the bottle to the ceiling. "To finally getting off the waitlist for my own husband's attention."

The wine went down warm and bitter, and I kept drinking until the bottle was half empty and the room started to blur. My phone rang twice. Both times it was Dimitri. Both times I let it go to voicemail. Whatever he had to say, I didn't want to hear it. Not tonight. Tonight was mine.

I fell asleep on the couch sometime around 3 AM, still in my clothes, one shoe on and one shoe off.

Back in the hospital, I knew exactly what was happening. Anya would be putting on her sad face, dabbing her eyes, whispering to Dimitri that maybe he should go after me.

"Dima, maybe you should go talk to her. I don't want to be the reason your marriage falls apart. I'll be fine here with Misha. Really."

And Dimitri, the fool, would shake his head and lean back in his chair with that arrogant half-smile.

"She's just trying to teach me a lesson. She does this every time she gets upset. She'll calm down by morning and pretend nothing happened. She always does."

Because I always did. Every single time, I swallowed my pride and went back to him. Every single time, I forgave him and told myself things would get better. He had trained himself to believe that my love was unconditional, unlimited, bottomless.

But even the deepest well runs dry.

Maybe, somewhere behind that wall of arrogance, a small part of him felt the difference this time. Maybe there was a flicker, tiny and unfamiliar, something like panic. Because in eight years, I had never looked at him with empty eyes before. I had never spoken to him without a single crack in my voice. I had never walked away without turning back.

But if he felt it, he buried it fast. Because that was what Dimitri Orlov did. He buried everything that didn't fit his version of the story.

I woke up to the feeling of warmth.

Morning sun was coming through the curtains. My head was pounding from the wine. And there was an arm draped over my waist, heavy and familiar, pulling me against a broad chest.

Dimitri.

He was sleeping behind me like nothing had happened. Like I hadn't served him divorce papers twelve hours ago. Like the signed documents weren't sitting in my bag on the kitchen counter. His breath was slow and even against the back of my neck, and his hand was resting on my stomach, possessive even in sleep.

I didn't move for a long time. I just lay there, staring at his fingers on my waist, remembering.

I remembered the day we met. Senior year at the university. He walked into the library with coffee in one hand and a statistics textbook in the other, and he sat down across from me without asking. "You look like you need rescuing from that calculus problem," he told me, grinning. I told him to mind his own business. He bought me lunch anyway.

I remembered the earthquake. Two months into dating, a 5.2 hit while we were in a parking garage. He threw himself over me without thinking, covering my body with his, and when it was over, he was shaking harder than I was. "If something happened to you," he whispered, "I wouldn't survive it."

I remembered the night he proposed. On our balcony, with the city lights below us and a ring he had saved up for six months to buy. "Forever, Katya. You and me. I'll never want anyone else."

Forever. What a word. What a lie.

I looked at his sleeping face now. Still handsome. Still the same face I fell in love with. But the man behind it had changed, or maybe I had just refused to see who he really was until now.

His heart belonged to Anya. His time belonged to Misha. And I was just the woman who shared his bed and his last name, a placeholder wife in a marriage that existed only on paper.

I wasn't going to be the other woman in my own marriage. I wasn't going to spend another year competing with a widow for scraps of my husband's attention. I was finished.

I carefully lifted his arm off my waist and slid out of bed.

No more forgiving. No more understanding. No more waiting for him to choose me.

This was not regret. This was th

e last act of self-respect I had left.