Chapter 3

I woke up and the first thing I heard was Justin’s voice.

Low and easy and warm, the way it used to be with me once, coming up the stairs through the gap under the bedroom door.

"She won't be a problem for much longer. Three weeks and she's gone."

I lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling, making sure I was actually awake.

"You're worrying too much." He laughed. He actually laughed. "She doesn't have the spine to make this difficult. She'll sign and disappear. She always does."

I sat up.

I looked at myself in the mirror across the room. Swollen eyes. Tangled hair. The face of a woman who had cried herself to sleep on a locked bedroom floor.

She doesn't have the spine.

I got up.

He was in the kitchen, leaning against the counter in yesterday's shirt with his coffee and his phone, talking to her, laughing with her, in the kitchen of the home we had shared for four years.

He saw me come in.

His expression didn't change. He didn't even have the decency to lower his voice.

I crossed the room and held out my hand.

He blinked. "What?"

"Give me the phone, Justin."

He stared at me like I was doing something slightly amusing. Then, with the ease of a man who found everything I did mildly entertaining, he held it out.

I took it.

"Harper, don't do something you'll—"

"Vivian." I put the phone to my ear and my voice came out clear and cold and nothing at all like the woman who had been crying on the floor eight hours ago. "I want you to listen to me very carefully."

I heard her shift. I heard the little pause that meant she hadn't expected this.

Good.

"All these years I have been professional. I have watched you take credit for my work in rooms full of people and I smiled. I have sat through meetings where you made me feel small in front of colleagues and I said nothing. I have been patient and polite and quiet because I thought that was what being a good person meant." My hand was shaking but my voice was not. "But you have been sleeping with my husband in my marriage and you have been standing in my home looking at me like I am beneath you and I am done being quiet about it." I heard her sharp intake of breath. "You are a coward, Vivian. You go after women who you think won't fight back. I want you to know, very clearly, that you were wrong about me."

The line went dead silent.

"Harper—" she started.

I ended the call.

I set the phone on the counter.

Justin was looking at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before. Not quite anger. Not quite respect. Something complicated that I didn't have the energy to interpret.

I picked up my keys.

"I'm going to pack my things," I said. "And then I'm leaving. And I won't be making this difficult. Not for your sake. For mine."

Then I walked upstairs.

I had thought packing would be the part that broke me.

It was worse than I'd thought.

Every object was a memory with teeth. The scarf he'd bought me from a trip before everything went wrong. The mug that was mine from before we even met, chipped on one side, that he used to tease me about keeping. The photograph on the dresser from our second anniversary where we were both laughing at something and I couldn't even remember what it was anymore and that felt like the saddest thing in the world.

I packed without letting myself stop moving. The moment I stopped, the grief caught up. So I kept moving. Kept folding. Kept stacking.

Two suitcases. One box.

Five years. Two suitcases and one box.

I sat on the edge of the stripped bed and pressed my hands over my face for a moment. Just a moment. I let the wave hit me and I breathed through it and then I stood up and picked up my bags. I wasn’t going to keep sulking. I’m done with this shit. Justin and Vivian can go to hell, they deserve each other

I had been standing on the pavement outside for twenty minutes before I admitted to myself that no taxi was coming.

The sun was doing nothing kind for my swollen eyes. I had my two suitcases and my box and I was standing on a residential street going absolutely nowhere.

A silver car slowed down.

The window came down.

Dr. Joel looked at me, at my suitcases, at my face. His expression did something careful and deliberate, the way someone's face goes when they are working very hard not to react to something that is upsetting them.

"Get in," he said.

"Dr Joel, you really don't need to—"

"Harper." His voice was quiet but it left no room for argument. "Get in the car."

I got in the car.

He put my suitcases in the trunk without making it a thing. He didn't ask me to explain. He didn't look at me with that face, the sorry face I had begged Dr. Joel not to give me last night. He just drove.

I looked out the window the whole way and I did not cry. Not then. I was all cried out for the moment. I just watched the city pass and breathed.

I directed him to my new apartment and we got there.

He carried my bags up three flights of stairs to my new apartment without being asked.

The apartment was small and smelled like fresh paint and emptiness. A mattress on the floor. A window with no curtains. I stood in the middle of it and told myself clean slate. It’s a new beginning. All the phrases people said.

But they felt hollow.

"It's a nice space," Dr. Joel said from the doorway. "Good light."

A sound came out of me. Half laugh, half something else entirely.

"Dr Joel." My voice splintered. "I have nothing. I don't have a plan or a backup plan or a single idea what I'm supposed to do now." The tears came back, because grief doesn't run out, I was learning that today, it just keeps refilling. "I have two suitcases and three months to live and my husband just chose my boss and I…"

I stopped.

I pressed my hand over my mouth and the sob came anyway. Full and wretched and beyond my ability to manage.

Dr. Joel crossed the room in four steps and put his hand on my shoulder and I turned into it like a person turning toward the only warmth in a cold room. I cried until my legs felt weak. I cried until I was holding onto his arm just to stay upright. He didn't move. He didn't say it would be okay. He just stood there like a wall that wasn't going anywhere.

When I finally pulled back, my face was a disaster. I could feel it.

"I'm sorry," I whispered.

"Don't." His voice was rough. Unsteady in a way I hadn't expected. "Don't apologize."

I looked up at him. His jaw was tight. His eyes were doing something they hadn't done in any of our previous appointments.

I opened my mouth to say something, and the pain in my stomach stopped every thought I had.

It was sharp, violent. Wrong in a way that was immediately, terrifyingly different from anything I had felt before.

I looked down and saw blood spreading through the fabric of my jeans. It was dark and real and impossible to misread

"Joel." His name came out as a whisper.

He was already moving before I finished saying it.