NEVER YOURS TO LOSE

"I want a divorce."

Stellan did not look up from his phone when he said it.

He was seated at the head of the breakfast table, jacket already on, coffee untouched, the morning light cutting a clean line across the marble surface between them. Three words. Delivered the way he might dictate a memo to his assistant. Flat. Certain. Final.

Corinna's hands stilled over the stove.

She did not turn around immediately. She needed a moment — just one — to make sure her face was ready. To make sure the thing cracking open inside her chest did not reach her eyes before she was prepared for him to see it.

She turned the burner off. Set the wooden spoon down. Smoothed the front of her dress with both palms even though it did not need smoothing.

Then she turned around.

Stellan was typing something. Still not looking at her.

"Did you hear me?" he said.

"I heard you."

Her voice came out steady. She was quietly grateful for that.

He looked up then — those pale grey eyes finding her face with the same expression he wore in board meetings. Measured. Resolved. Already past the hard part in his own mind, as though the decision had been made so long ago that telling her was merely a formality he had delayed out of inconvenience.

"I think we both know this hasn't been a real marriage for some time," he said. "I'm not interested in prolonging something that isn't working for either of us."

Corinna looked at him. Really looked at him. The strong jaw, the dark hair, the expensive cut of everything he wore. Three years she had shared a home with this man. Three years she had learned the exact temperature he liked his coffee, the particular silence that meant he was stressed, the way he exhaled slowly through his nose when a deal was not going the way he wanted.

Three years of knowing him completely.

And he was sitting there telling her their marriage was not working for either of them, as though her side of that equation had ever been consulted.

"Is there someone else?" she asked.

The pause was less than a second. But Corinna had spent three years studying this man's silences.

"That's not relevant to what I'm asking."

So yes, then.

She already knew. She had known for longer than she had been willing to admit to herself. The late evenings. The phone he always turned face-down. The way the warmth that never came to her seemed to exist somewhere else, for someone else, in a life she was not part of.

She had stayed anyway.

She had told herself that patience was a form of love. That if she was steady enough, warm enough, present enough, something in him would eventually turn toward her the way a plant turns toward light.

It never did.

"I'll have my lawyer contact yours by end of week," Stellan said, pushing back from the table. He picked up his phone, slid it into his pocket, reached for the jacket draped over the back of his chair. "We can keep this civil. There's no reason it has to be complicated."

Corinna did not say anything.

She watched him shrug the jacket onto his shoulders with the same unhurried ease he did everything. Watched him check his watch. Watched him move toward the door the way he always did — without looking back, without pausing, without leaving any space for the possibility that she might need something from him before he walked out.

"Corinna."

She looked at him.

For just a moment something shifted in his expression. Something she could not name and did not trust herself to read.

"I'm sorry it came to this," he said.

She almost laughed.

Sorry it came to this. As though their marriage was a business deal that had soured through circumstance rather than a living thing he had starved quietly for three years.

"Thank you for breakfast," he said.

And then he was gone.

The front door clicked shut behind him.

Corinna stood in the kitchen for a long moment. The untouched coffee steamed gently on the table. The morning light moved across the marble. Outside she could hear the low hum of his car pulling out of the driveway, growing fainter, and then disappearing entirely.

She walked to the table. Sat down in the chair across from where he had been sitting. Pressed both hands flat against the cool marble surface and breathed in once, slowly, through her nose.

Then she reached across the table and picked up his coffee cup. Set it in front of her. Looked at it for a moment.

She had known this was coming. She had felt it the way you feel weather before it arrives — a pressure in the air, a change in the quality of the light. She had known and she had stayed anyway, because leaving first would have meant admitting that the love she had poured into this marriage had found nowhere to land.

Now he had made the decision for her.

She thought about crying. She waited for it. The wave she had been holding back for months.

It did not come.

What came instead was something quieter. Something that settled into her bones with the stillness of a decision already made.

She set the coffee cup back down.

Stood up.

Walked to the window and looked out at the empty driveway for a long moment.

Then she picked up her phone, scrolled to a contact she had not called in over three years, and pressed dial.

It rang twice.

"Corinna." Her mother's voice. Careful. Waiting.

"It's done," Corinna said quietly. "I'm coming home."

A pause.

"I'll have your office ready by morning," Neva Voss said.