CHAPTER 1:: The Papers

The divorce papers arrived on a Tuesday.

I know it was a Tuesday because I had been making coffee — the good kind, the kind that takes twelve minutes in the pour-over and fills the whole kitchen with something warm and real — and I remember thinking that Tuesdays did not deserve good coffee. Tuesdays were for instant. Tuesdays were for surviving.

Then the courier knocked, and Tuesdays became something else entirely.

I set the mug down on the white marble island — Dominic's choice, not mine; I had wanted warm walnut — and signed for the envelope without looking at the return address. I already knew. I think some part of me had known for months, the way you know a storm is coming before the sky changes color. You feel it in the air. In the silence.

The Hartley penthouse had been full of silence for a long time.

I carried the envelope to the dining room table — twelve seats, always twelve, for the dinner parties we never threw — and sat down in my usual chair. The one that faced the city. On clear mornings, I could see all the way to the river from here, that silver ribbon threading through Manhattan like something alive. I used to love that view. Now it just made the apartment feel larger.

I opened the envelope carefully.

I am not a dramatic person. I want to be honest about that, even here, even in my own memory of that morning. I did not cry. I did not gasp. I read the words — Petition for Dissolution of Marriage, Dominic James Hartley, Petitioner — and I felt something move through me that I cannot name. Not grief, not yet. Something more like recognition. Like hearing a sentence you have been quietly finishing in your head for years and finally discovering that someone else wrote it down.

He wanted the dissolution to be uncontested.

Of course he did. Dominic handled everything as efficiently as a board meeting. He would have had his legal team prepare this weeks ago, probably in the same hour he made whatever decision sent him in this direction. He was not a man who deliberated. He decided, and then the world arranged itself accordingly.

That had been one of the things I loved about him once. That certainty. Standing next to Dominic Hartley felt like standing inside a structure that would never fall.

I had not understood, at twenty-four, that a structure could be perfectly engineered and still leave no room for you to breathe.

* * *

My phone rang at eleven-fifteen. I had been sitting at the table for two hours, the papers spread in front of me, the coffee gone cold.

"Selene." My mother's voice. She had a gift for saying my name like a complete sentence.

"Hi, Mom."

"You sound strange. What happened?"

I looked at the papers. At Dominic's signature at the bottom of the last page — that slashing, impatient scrawl I had watched sign a hundred contracts, a hundred checks, a hundred things that mattered to him.

"Dominic filed," I said.

Silence. Then a long exhale. Not surprised — my mother had never been surprised by Dominic Hartley's failures, only by the timing of them. "When?"

"Papers arrived this morning. He wants it uncontested."

"Of course he does." Her voice had the particular flatness of a woman holding back I told you so with both hands. "What do you want?"

It was such a simple question. I had forgotten, somewhere in four years of marriage, that it was one I was allowed to ask myself.

"I want it to be over," I said.

And the terrible thing — the thing that sat in my chest like a stone and stayed there for a long time after I hung up the phone — was that I meant it. I had loved Dominic Hartley with everything I had. I had bent myself into shapes I did not recognize trying to fit into the life he needed me to be. And I was tired. Bone-tired, down-to-the-marrow tired.

I wanted to be over.

I picked up a pen.

* * *

I did not know, as I signed my name on that Tuesday morning, that Dominic had expected me to call him.

I did not know that he had sat in his office on the forty-second floor with his phone face-up on his desk for six hours, watching it the way he never watched me.

I did not know that when his assistant, Priya, finally told him the courier had confirmed delivery at nine forty-seven a.m., he had nodded once, pressed his thumb into the center of his palm the way he did when he was containing something, and said, "Good."

And I did not know that twenty minutes later, he had stood at his floor-to-ceiling window — the one that faced south, the one he'd told me about when he first brought me up here, the one he'd said gave him the best view in the city — and felt, for the first time in longer than he could account for, entirely, inexplicably alone.

I would not learn any of this for a very long time.

But later, I would think: that was the moment it started. Not our marriage. Not our love. Not our divorce.

His regret.