Engagement party

“Here, sign it.”

Jeremy threw the paper at me like it was nothing. Like I was nothing.

I was cutting an orange for breakfast, and the knife slipped from my hand when the page hit the floor. I bent down to grab it, already talking, already forgiving him before he even asked for it, the way I always did.

Then I read the header.

Petition for Dissolution of Marriage.

My knees went weak. I stood there holding the reason my whole life was about to end, and Jeremy didn’t even look up from his phone.

“Jeremy.” My voice shook. “You gave me the wrong paper.”

“No I didn’t.”

Two words. That was all I got after two years of marriage. Two years of making his coffee exactly the way he liked it, two years of covering for him at work, two years of loving a man who couldn’t even look me in the eye while he ended us.

“What do you mean, no you didn’t?” I held the paper out to him with both hands, like maybe if I gave it back he’d take it and laugh and say it was a joke.

He finally looked up. There was nothing behind his eyes. Not guilt. Not love. Nothing.

“I want a divorce, Kara.”

The room tilted. I actually felt it tilt, like the floor had decided to stop holding me up.

“Why?” I asked. “Just tell me why.”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me!” My voice cracked halfway through the sentence, and I pressed my lips shut too late to stop him from hearing it happen.

He set his phone down, finally, and looked at me the way you’d look at something stuck to your shoe.

“You actually thought I loved you.” He laughed, short and cold. “That’s on you.”

I reached for his arm before I could stop myself, my fingers already curling toward his sleeve like they remembered a version of him that didn’t exist anymore. He knocked my hand away so hard it stung, and I looked down at my own palm like it belonged to a stranger.

He didn’t apologize. He never even blinked.

“I’ve been sick for weeks,” I said. “I told you about the pain in my chest. You barely looked up from your phone.”

“Maybe you should see a doctor about that.” He said it flat, like he was talking about the weather, not the woman he’d promised to love.

“I can’t keep pretending anymore.” He grabbed his jacket off the chair. “Whatever we had, it’s over.”

“What did we have?” I called after him. “Was any of it even real?”

He paused at the door. Just for a second. His shoulders went stiff, like something almost cracked open in him, and then it sealed shut again before I could see what was underneath.

“Sign the papers before I get back.” He didn’t turn around. “Or you’ll regret it.”

The door slammed. I stood alone in my kitchen holding divorce papers, and my hands didn’t start shaking until I was sure he couldn’t see them anymore.

I don’t know how long I sat on the couch before the pain came. Not the heartbreak kind. A real pain, sharp and tight, right behind my ribs, the kind that made it hard to breathe. I’d been feeling it for weeks and telling myself it was stress.

My phone rang. Victoria.

“Kara, love, are you free tonight?” Her voice was too cheerful for the day I was having.

“Why?” I wiped my face with the back of my hand.

“My cousin’s engagement party. Five star hotel, the whole thing. I can bring a plus one and you desperately need to get out of that apartment.”

I looked at the photo on our wall. Jeremy’s arms around me, his face buried in my hair, a man who apparently never existed. We never even had an engagement party. I used to dream about mine, the dress, the toast, his hand under the table. We registered quietly instead, to stay out of the press. He promised a real wedding later. Later never came.

“I’ll go,” I said, because staying home with my own heartbreak sounded worse than watching someone else’s happiness.

An hour later I stood in a hotel ballroom, gold light everywhere, watching Victoria scan the crowd for something. Her hand shot out and grabbed my elbow, steering me hard in the opposite direction before I even saw what she was avoiding.

I didn’t ask why. I should have.

Someone bumped into me and wine splashed cold down my dress.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry.”

I knew that voice. “Xavier?”

All the color drained from his face at once.

“What are you doing here?” His voice dropped low and urgent, nothing like the warm, easy way he usually talked to me.

His eyes darted around the room like he was looking for an exit. My hands went cold around the stem of my glass.

“Why shouldn’t she be here?” Victoria’s smile stayed frozen on her mouth.

Xavier looked at her, and something passed between them, fast and sharp, gone before I could catch it.

“You brought her here?” He said it like an accusation.

“Kara.” He grabbed my hand. His grip was warm, warmer than it should have been given how cold his voice sounded. “You need to leave. Right now. For your own good.”

I let him pull me two steps before I planted my feet.

“Let go of me. Why does everyone in this room act like they know something I don’t?”

He didn’t answer. My pulse climbed into my throat and stayed there. There was something in his face I’d never seen before, his jaw tight, his eyes fixed on a point just past my shoulder instead of on me, gone the second he realized I’d noticed.

I yanked my hand free. My palm was still warm where his had been.

Two years I’d known this man. Two years of him showing up at exactly the right moment, disappearing before I could ask why, looking at me like I was something worth protecting when nobody else did. I never let myself wonder what that meant. I didn’t have room to wonder, not with a husband to hold together.

I turned toward the hall Victoria had been steering me away from, and found a wall covered in photographs.

Jeremy. Laughing. His arm around a woman I recognized even from three feet and a bad angle, because I’d spent two years pretending I never thought about her.

Brittany.

My legs moved before I told them to. I don’t remember crossing that room. I only remember reaching the altar and finding them there together, close, easy, like two people who’d stopped performing because there was no one left worth performing for.

“Jeremy.” My voice barely made it out. “Is this you?”

He looked up. Alarm flashed across his face, folded fast into irritation.

“What are you doing here?” Low. Urgent. Not an answer.

“That’s not what I asked.”

Nobody in this room planned on giving me a straight answer tonight. Underneath the humiliation building in my chest, something colder was taking shape, no longer confusion, but a sick certainty that I was standing inside a picture nobody had let me see whole.

I coughed once into my hand.

When I pulled it away, my palm was red.