CHAPTER 3: The Morning He Came Home

He came home the night after the papers were delivered.

I had not expected that. I had assumed — and I realize now how much of my marriage was built on assumptions, on reading a man who spoke in silences — that he would give me days. That he would send Priya to coordinate the logistics of separating two lives from a safe, executive distance. That was how Dominic managed difficult things: efficiently and without direct contact.

I was in the kitchen at eight p.m., making dinner out of habit. Pasta, simple, the kind I made when I was too tired to think. The kind Dominic never ate because he had a nutritionist and a rule about carbohydrates past six.

The elevator opened.

I did not turn around. I heard his footsteps on the foyer tile — that particular cadence, unhurried and deliberate — and I heard him pause when he reached the kitchen doorway, and I kept stirring the pasta because I did not know what my face was going to do and I needed another moment before he could see it.

"You're cooking," he said.

"Observation of the year."

A beat. He came farther into the kitchen. I could feel him behind me the way you can feel a fire in a room — not warmth, exactly, but a change in the quality of the air. He stopped at the island and I heard the familiar sound of him setting his keys down on the marble.

Keys he would not be setting down here much longer.

"Selene."

"I signed them," I said. "This afternoon. They should be with your attorney by tomorrow morning."

Another silence. Longer this time.

"That was fast," he said. His voice was careful in the way it got when he was recalibrating. I had learned to read that voice the way meteorologists learn to read pressure changes — not by what it said but by what it was containing.

I turned off the burner. Turned to face him.

He looked, as he always looked, like someone had engineered him specifically to be difficult to walk away from. That jaw, those dark eyes, the particular set of his shoulders in a suit that probably cost more than my first car. He was watching me with an expression I did not recognize, which was notable because I had catalogued most of his expressions over four years the way you catalogue the features of a landscape you are afraid of losing.

This one was new.

"Was there something you needed to discuss?" I asked.

"I —" He stopped. Started again. "I wanted to make sure you had everything you needed. In terms of the settlement. I asked Gareth to ensure the terms were fair."

Gareth was his lead attorney. The settlement was generous: the apartment in the West Village that had been in my name before the marriage, a financial arrangement that would give me stability while I rebuilt, no contested assets. I had looked at it with my own attorney — a fierce woman named Tobias who had spent thirty years watching wealthy men try to be fair and had become an expert at identifying when they weren't — and she had said, "He's not trying to cheat you."

"I know," I'd told her. "He just wants it clean."

Now I looked at Dominic in the kitchen of the apartment that had never quite felt like mine and I said, "The terms are fine. Thank you."

Something moved across his face.

"Is that all you have to say?"

I considered him for a moment. The pasta was cooling behind me. The city made its low, constant sound beyond the windows. We were two people who had been married for four years standing on opposite sides of a marble island and the distance felt geological.

"What did you want me to say, Dominic?"

He looked at me for a long moment. His jaw tightened — that familiar tell, the one that meant he was holding something behind his teeth.

"I don't know," he said. Which was, in four years, one of the most honest things he had ever said to me.

"Then I think we've covered it," I said.

* * *

He didn't leave.

That surprised me. I had plated the pasta — both portions, because my hands did it automatically — and set them on the counter, and I was reaching for a fork when I heard him sit down on one of the island stools. I turned and he was there, jacket off now, sleeves rolled to the elbow, looking at the plate I had put in front of him with an expression I could not parse.

"You made two," he said.

"Habit."

He picked up a fork. I watched him for a moment, then sat across from him, because I was too tired to make a statement out of not sitting.

We ate in silence. Not the bad silence — not the silence of the last two years, weighted and avoidant. Something else. Something that felt, absurdly, like the silences of our first months, when we used to sit like this and not need to fill the air.

"The Singapore trip," he said suddenly.

I looked up.

"In year two." His eyes were on his plate. "The partnership you were offered. The one in the West Village."

My fork stopped moving.

"I've been thinking about that," he said. Quiet. Matter-of-fact, the way he presented data in board meetings. "I don't think I understood what I was asking you to give up."

The kitchen felt very still.

"No," I said, after a moment. "You didn't."

He nodded once. Still looking at his plate. Like a man confirming a line item, like a man adding up a column of numbers and arriving at a total he did not like.

"I'm sorry for that," he said.

Three words I had spent four years waiting for, arriving now, on the night after the divorce papers, in a kitchen where there was nothing left to save.

I stood up. Took my plate to the sink.

"Goodnight, Dominic," I said.

I went to the guest room — I had moved there six months ago, and he had not said a word — and I closed the door, and I sat on the edge of the bed, and I pressed my hand over my mouth, and I breathed.

Because here was the thing about Dominic Hartley's apology.

It was real. I could hear that it was real. And it was three years too late. And some part of me — the part that had loved him in the gallery in Chelsea, the part that had believed in that surprised, real laugh — some part of me broke open a little, quietly, in the dark.

And I was not, even then, sure whether it was grief or something more dangerous.