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

Last Updated : 2026-02-24

CHAPTER 2: Four Years In a Single Room

People ask — or they will ask, later, once the story gets out and it will get out because it always does when the name Hartley is attached to any piece of human wreckage — they will ask how we ended up there. How a marriage between a woman who designed things for a living and a man who built things for a dynasty could arrive at a Tuesday morning and twelve pages of legal paper.The honest answer is gradual. The honest answer is a hundred small silences that accumulated into a wall.I met Dominic at a gallery opening in Chelsea on a night when I had not wanted to go. Camille had dragged me — she has always been the kind of friend who drags you toward the things that change your life, and she has never once apologized for it. The gallery was showing a young sculptor whose work involved suspension: objects caught mid-fall, frozen in resin, preserved in the moment before impact. I had stood in front of a piece for a long time. A coffee cup, suspended mid-tip, the dark liquid arcing outwar

Last Updated : 2026-02-24

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 cooki

Last Updated : 2026-02-24

CHAPTER 4: Camille, Coffee, and The Truth

"Tell me everything," Camille said, "from the beginning, and leave out nothing that might be emotionally inconvenient."We were at a table by the window of our favorite coffee place on Bleecker Street, the one with the mismatched chairs and the barista who had learned our orders so well she started making them when we walked through the door. Camille had a flat white. I had something with too much vanilla in it because I was having a week where I needed too much vanilla.I told her. The papers. The evening. The pasta. The apology.When I finished, Camille was quiet for three seconds, which was unusual for her, and then she said: "He made pasta with you. The man who has a nutritionist named Francois and a rule about carbs after six. He sat down and ate pasta with you the night after you signed his divorce papers.""I made the pasta. He just... sat.""Selene." She leaned forward. "He was trying to stay.""He filed.""People do things they don't mean all the time when they're terrified a

Last Updated : 2026-02-24

CHAPTER 5: Nicolas Crane

The offices of Crane & Aldous Creative were nothing like the corporate environments I had spent four years moving through as Dominic's wife. No uniformed staff, no marble atrium, no sense that the building itself was trying to communicate net worth. Crane & Aldous occupied the third and fourth floors of a converted warehouse in SoHo — exposed brick, open plan, the kind of organized creative chaos that had coffee rings on desks and good art on the walls and the particular productive noise of people who liked what they did.I loved it immediately and told myself not to count on that.The receptionist, a college-aged kid with paint on his sneakers, brought me to a glass-walled conference room and told me Nicolas would be with me in a moment. I set my portfolio on the table and straightened my jacket — a deep burgundy blazer I had bought the day before because the old Selene wore Dominic-adjacent neutrals and I was actively, consciously dismantling her — and looked out the glass at the op

Last Updated : 2026-02-24

All Chapters of THE PRICE OF LETTING GO: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

CHAPTER 1:: The Papers

CHAPTER 2: Four Years In a Single Room

CHAPTER 3: The Morning He Came Home

CHAPTER 4: Camille, Coffee, and The Truth

CHAPTER 5: Nicolas Crane