Chapter 5 — THERE WAS NO GOING BACK.

Lydia’s POV

I called the lawyer on a Wednesday night, by Friday the papers were ready.

I didn't tell David. I didn't announce it, I got the papers and brought them home in a brown envelope and put them in the nightstand drawer where the lawyer's card used to be.

Then I waited.

Not for him to change. I was done waiting for that, I was waiting for myself, for the part of me that had loved this man for 3 years to finish its grieving so the rest of me could move.

It took four days. Those four days were the strangest of my life.

I moved through the house like a guest, quietly, touching things lightly. I washed my own dishes and made my own coffee and slept on my side of the bed and watched David move through his life like a man who had already rewritten the story and was just waiting for the paperwork to catch up.

Nina came every day that week, not three times anymore. Every day.

I watched it and said nothing.

She was in my kitchen every morning when I came downstairs, standing at my stove. Using my pans. Cooking food she plated and left on the counter without looking at me. David ate it every time without a word to me about it.

On Thursday morning I came downstairs and found them at the kitchen table together, kissing. When I walked in they didn't jump apart the way they used to. David looked up briefly and looked back down, Nina didn't look up at all.

I staggered at the doorway of my own kitchen, I pulled myself together, I knew then, it was really over. They weren't hiding anymore.

I went back upstairs. I opened the nightstand drawer. I took the envelope out and held it in my lap.

I signed the papers that afternoon at the kitchen table.

David had gone out. Nina was somewhere in the house, I could hear her moving around upstairs, the particular sound of her settling into spaces that didn't belong to her.

I sat at the table where I had cooked a hundred dinners and hosted three dinner parties and cried alone most times, I opened the envelope and I read every page.

I picked up the pen, my hand didn't shake.

I had expected it to shake. It didn't.

I signed every page slowly and deliberately, tears drop on the papers.

I put the papers back in the envelope, sealed it. Set it on the kitchen table where he would find it.

Then I went upstairs, with one bag.

I had thought about this moment for four days and I had decided, not because I had nowhere to put more. I refused to let this house think I needed everything it contained. The furniture could stay, the anniversary photographs and the 3 years of accumulated life could all stay.

I was taking myself. That was enough.

I moved through the bedroom carefully. Folded things, packed what mattered, my work documents, my mother's photograph from the nightstand, the small things that were mine, before this marriage and I zipped the bag.

Stood in the middle of the bedroom and looked at it one last time. I picked up the bag.

I walked out.

I had my hand on the handle when I heard her.

"Leaving so soon?"

Nina was standing at the bottom of the stairs, arms loose at her sides, that same warm smile that had never once been warm for me sitting perfectly on her face. She looked at my bag. At the door and back at me.

"You should take your time," she said pleasantly. "There's no rush."

I looked at her. This woman I had let into my home. She had come in quietly and taken everything I wasn't holding tightly all to herself.

I had so many things I could have said.

I said none of them.

I opened the front door.

"Thank you," Nina said, whispering behind me, her voice smooth and unhurried and completely sure of itself. "For making my arrival so smooth."

The door closed behind me.