Lahat ng Kabanata ng Divorced After One Night: The Plus-Size Ex-Wife’s Revenge: Kabanata 31 - Kabanata 40

I noticed the car before I noticed anything else.It was parked across from the hotel entrance when I left for the pharmacy that morning, dark, ordinary, nothing about it that should have caught my attention except that it was still there three hours later when I came back, the same angle, the same spot, like it had never moved at all.I told myself it was nothing. People parked cars. People sat in them sometimes, waiting for someone, checking a phone, doing whatever ordinary people did in cars on ordinary mornings. I walked past it without looking too closely and went up to my room and tried to forget about it.I couldn't forget about it.That afternoon I went to the little market two blocks over, the one with the good bread and the tired cashier who never asked questions, and on the walk back I felt it again, that same feeling I'd started noticing without being able to name it. The sense of someone a few paces behind me, matching my pace exactly, close enough that if I stopped they'

Dana called on a Sunday morning, which was unusual enough that I almost let the call go to voicemail."I'm not calling to check on you," she said the second I answered, which was such a Dana thing to say that I actually laughed for the first time in what felt like weeks. "I'm calling because I need your opinion on something, and you're the only person I trust to give it to me straight.""My opinion on what?""I'm downsizing my office. Moving into something smaller now that I've cut back my hours,I have some furniture I don't need anymore, and I refuse to let a moving company throw perfectly good furniture into a dumpster.""Dana, I don't have anywhere to put furniture. I'm living in a hotel room.""I'm aware of that," she said in the brisk, no-nonsense tone she used to use on students who tried to argue with her about a grade. "Which is why I'm not asking you to put it in your hotel room. I'm talking about a desk, a decent lamp, and a filing cabinet. I've already paid for a storage

I woke up to fluorescent light and the steady beep of a monitor, and for a few seconds I didn't remember where I was or why my shoulder ached like it had been struck with something solid.Then it came back all at once,the headlights,the sound of the engine climbing too fast and the newspaper box against my back.I sat up too quickly and a wave of dizziness rolled through me, and a nurse appeared almost immediately, a hand gentle on my shoulder, easing me back down against the pillow."Easy," she said. "You're okay,you took a hard fall, but you're okay.""The baby," I said, my voice cracking on the word. "Is the baby….""The baby's fine," she said, and something in my chest that had been clenched so tight it hurt finally loosened. "We monitored the heartbeat for a few hours after you came in…..strong and steady the whole time. You had some cramping from the shock and the fall, but nothing came of it. You were lucky."Lucky. I turned that word over in my mind while she checked the monit

The bank was quiet when I walked in, just after it opened, the kind of quiet that made every sound feel too loud, my own footsteps too obvious against the marble floor.I'd decided the night before that I needed cash….real cash, enough to get me somewhere new and keep me steady for the first few weeks, before I had a job again, before I had any kind of income I could count on. I didn't trust cards anymore,I didn't trust anything that left a trail someone could follow if they wanted to badly enough.I filled out the withdrawal slip at the little counter by the window, my hand steadier than I expected, and got in line behind two other customers.When it was my turn, the teller, a young man with a name tag that said Dominic, took the slip and typed something into his computer, and I watched his expression shift, just slightly, a small crease forming between his eyebrows."One moment," he said, and picked up a phone at his station, speaking too quietly for me to hear."Is there a problem

I sat on the edge of the hotel bed with my phone in my hand for almost twenty minutes before I worked up the nerve to call.I'd thought, at first, that I might go by the house one more time. Say it in person, whatever there was left to say,but every time I pictured that porch, that chain lock, my mother's hand reaching through a four-inch gap holding something meant to make me go away quietly, I understood I didn't have it in me to stand there again and watch her not open the door all the way.So I called instead.It rang four times before it went to voicemail, her recorded voice bright and pleasant in a way that didn't match anything about who she'd actually been to me these past weeks. *You've reached the Grayson residence, please leave a message after the tone.*The tone sounded,I sat there for a second, my throat tight, and then I just started talking, because if I waited any longer I was going to lose my nerve entirely."Hi, Mom. It's me." I stopped, feeling how strange that soun