Chapter 2

The End of My Marriage

Ava’s POV

My hands were shaking so badly it took me two tries to open the envelope.

Part of me had already built a small, foolish story to explain it away. A business trip he wanted to surprise me with. Papers from his grandmother’s estate. Anything but what it actually was.

I pulled out the stack of documents and stared at the words printed across the top page in plain, merciless black letters.

PETITION FOR DIVORCE.

For a moment I genuinely thought I had misread it. I blinked and looked again, waiting for the letters to rearrange themselves into something that made sense. They didn’t.

“Lucas.” My voice came out smaller than I intended. “Is this some kind of joke?”

He didn’t sit down. He stood on the other side of the table, arms crossed, watching me the way he might watch a stranger deliver bad news in a meeting l, calm, composed, already three steps ahead of my reaction.

“It isn’t a joke, Ava. I want to end this marriage.”

I laughed, a short, disbelieving sound that didn’t feel like it belonged to me. “Tonight? You’re doing this tonight?”

“There’s no good night for this.”

I looked down at the papers again, at the roses and candles still glowing between us like they hadn’t gotten the message that the evening was over. “At least tell me why. A year, Lucas. We’ve been married a year, and I don’t even get an explanation?”

Something shifted in his expression then — not softer, just more deliberate, like he’d rehearsed this part.

“Confidential files were leaked from Sterling Group last month. Product designs, contract terms, things that should never have left the building. The investigation traced the breach back to a device registered under your name.”

The room seemed to tilt slightly. “My laptop?”

“Yes.”

“Lucas, my laptop was stolen. Months ago. I filed a police report, I told you about it the week it happened, don’t you remember? I bought a new one because mine never turned up.”

“IT confirmed the files were accessed through your original device. Your login. Your credentials.”

“Because someone stole it! Anyone could have used it once it was gone. That doesn’t mean it was me.”

“The investigation says otherwise.”

“The investigation is wrong.” My voice cracked on the last word, and I hated that it did, hated that I could feel tears already building when what I wanted more than anything was to sound strong enough that he’d actually listen to me. “You know me. You’ve lived with me for a year. Do you honestly believe I would do something like that?”

He was quiet for a moment, and for one terrible second I thought maybe I’d reached him. Then he spoke, and his voice was even, unshaken.

“I believe the evidence.”

Those four words did more damage than anything else he’d said all night. Not because they were cruel, but because they weren’t. He said them the same way he’d say a stock had dropped, or a meeting had been moved. No anger. No doubt. Just a decision he had already made, long before he walked through that door.

I looked at the table,  the lamb I’d spent the afternoon making, the candles I’d lit with my own hands, the cufflinks still sitting in their box because he hadn’t so much as glanced at them, and I understood, all at once, that none of it had ever had a chance. He hadn’t come home late because of traffic or a meeting that ran over. He’d come home late because he’d needed the extra time to decide how he was going to say this to me.

He had let me spend the entire day preparing for a celebration he already knew wasn’t going to happen.

“You let me cook for you,” I said quietly, more to myself than to him. “You let me set the table. You let me believe—” I stopped, because finishing that sentence out loud would have broken something in me that I needed to keep intact for just a little while longer.

“I didn’t know how else to do it,” he said, and for the first time all evening, there was something almost like discomfort in his voice. It didn’t matter. Discomfort wasn’t an apology.

I could have kept arguing. I could have listed every reason the investigation was flawed, could have begged him to wait, to check again, to trust me over a spreadsheet of login times. But looking at his face, I understood there was no argument that would reach him tonight. He had already tried and convicted me somewhere in his own head, and nothing I said in this room was going to undo that.

So I picked up the pen he had set beside the papers, and I signed.

My hand barely shook as I did it, which surprised me. Maybe some part of me had known, for months now, that this was coming in one form or another. Maybe I had simply been waiting for the excuse to stop pretending.

I thought, briefly, about the envelope upstairs. About the two pink lines and the doctor’s careful, kind voice explaining due dates and prenatal vitamins. About how easy it would be to tell him right now, to lay it on the table next to the divorce papers and watch his composure crack for the first time all night.

I didn’t do it.

He would think I was using it. A last, desperate card played by a wife who’d been caught and was scrambling for a way out. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of doubting that too. Whatever happened next, my baby wasn’t going to be a bargaining chip in someone else’s investigation.

I set the pen down, gathered the signed papers, and walked past him without another word. He didn’t stop me. He didn’t say anything at all.

The stairs felt longer than I remembered, each step heavier than the last, my heels loud against the marble in the otherwise silent house. 

Halfway up, a wave of dizziness hit me so suddenly that I had to grip the banister to keep from stumbling. My vision blurred at the edges, my stomach lurching in a way that had nothing to do with heartbreak.

The hospital envelope slipped from my fingers.

I caught it just before it hit the floor, my heart pounding, my hand pressed flat against the wall to steady myself, and for one dizzy, terrifying moment, I wasn’t sure which was going to give out first, my legs, or whatever was left of my heart.