Chapter 2

"A divorce?" The word felt foreign in my mouth. It felt like saying a word so many times it stops meaning anything. "Why? Did I do something wrong?"

Justin looked at me the way someone looks at a question they consider too simple to answer seriously.

"You've been sick for two years, Harper." He moved to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water like we were discussing something mundane. Like we were talking about the electricity bill. "I didn't sign up to be a nurse. I've waited. I've tried to be patient. But I'm done watching my life disappear around your hospital appointments."

I stared at him.

Two years. Two years of fighting to stay alive, of pushing through days when getting out of bed felt like climbing a mountain, of trying not to be a burden, of apologizing for being sick like it was something I had chosen. Two years of loving a man who had apparently been keeping a countdown.

"And her?" I looked at Vivian on the couch.

Vivian didn't even look up.

"That's not your concern," Justin said.

Not my concern. The woman sitting in my home. My boss. My husband's—

I couldn't finish the thought.

"Look at me." My voice came out shaking and I hated it. I hated how broken I sounded. "Justin, please look at me."

He looked at me.

And that was almost worse. Because he did it so easily. No flinching. No regret in his eyes. He looked at me the same way you looked at something you used to need but had long since replaced.

I wanted to tell him. Right then. I wanted to say the words. I'm pregnant. We're having a baby. Please don't do this.

But I looked at his face and I knew.

It wouldn't matter.

The man standing in front of me would look at that news and calculate it as one more complication. One more weight. I could see it in every line of him.

So I swallowed it. I pressed it down deep and I swallowed it whole.

"Give me three weeks," I said. My voice was steadier now. The kind of steady that comes not from strength but from running out of options. "To find somewhere to go. That's all I'm asking."

He considered it for exactly as long as it took him to decide I wasn't worth arguing with.

"Fine. First of the month. Not a day later."

Vivian stood up from the couch and smoothed her coat. "I'll wait in the car," she said to Justin. To Justin, not to me. Not even a glance in my direction as she passed me and walked out through my front door.

Justin finished his water and set the glass down.

"Don't make this difficult," he said. And then he walked upstairs to our room like it was still just his.

I stood in the middle of the living room alone.

The envelope sat on the coffee table. White against dark wood. My whole marriage, folded up and waiting for a signature.

I walked to the bedroom, closed the door and locked it.

And then I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor with my knees pulled up to my chest and I pressed my face into my arms and I cried in a way I hadn't cried since I was a child. The kind of crying that isn't graceful or quiet. The kind that shakes your whole body and steals your breath and leaves you feeling hollowed out and wrung dry.

I thought about who he used to be.

I met Justin Johnson at Vivian's company, the same company that was apparently now the setting for both the beginning and the end of the most important relationship of my life.

I was twenty-four. Brand new to the city, terrified of everything, and doing an absolutely terrible job of hiding it. My first week I spilled coffee on the shared printer, filed an entire quarter's worth of reports in the wrong folders, and got laughed out of the break room by a group of women who had decided within ten minutes that I was exactly the kind of person they didn't need to take seriously.

I was fighting tears in the corridor when Justin appeared.

He didn't comment on my red eyes. He just handed me a bottle of water and said, "The printer was already broken. You just gave us an excuse to get a new one."

And he smiled at me. Like I was worth smiling at.

He was my only friend at that office for almost a year. He walked me to my car after late nights. He taught me how to navigate the politics without losing myself in them. He was warm and solid and constant, and I fell in love with him the way you fall into deep water, slow at first and then all at once.

On our wedding day he held my face in his hands and he looked at me like I was the most important thing in any room he'd ever stood in.

I had believed him.

For five years I had believed every single word.

After the crying stopped, when I was empty and exhausted and my face felt swollen and strange, I sat on the floor of that locked room and picked up my phone.

Dr. Joel answered on the second ring.

"Harper? Is everything alright?"

I stared at the water stain on the ceiling. The one Justin had promised to fix eight months ago. He never fixed it.

"I need you to stop the treatment," I said. My voice was flat. Used up.

There was  silence after I said those words, like I’ve just dropped a bomb.

"Harper—"

"I can't pay for it. I don't have the money anymore and I need this to stay between us." My throat tightened. "I just want to go quietly. I don't want a fuss. I don't want people looking at me with that face, that sorry face, for however long I have left." A tear slid down my temple into my hair. I didn't bother wiping it. "Please. Just let me have that."

"Harper." His voice was thick. Like the words were costing him something. "Get some sleep. We'll talk tomorrow. Please don't make any decisions tonight."

I hung up.

Outside the window, I heard a car start. Justin and Vivian, driving away into the dark.

I pressed both hands over my stomach and I cried again. Quieter this time. The kind of crying you do when you're grieving something that hasn't fully happened yet but you can already see it coming.

The baby that didn't know anything was wrong.

The husband who had already left before he walked out the door.

The months I had left, ticking down.