All Chapters of Go Away Chris : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Chris's POVThe formal settlement documents arrived at my legal team's office in October and I signed them on a Thursday afternoon in Patricia's office, sitting across from my own lawyers with Ayesha's lawyers on the other side of the table.Ayesha was not there. Patricia had indicated this was her preference, and my team had communicated to hers that I had no objection, and the documents were executed in the particular quiet efficiency of a formal process that both parties have decided to complete without additional friction.I signed my name in the places indicated, eleven times in total, and each signature was a specific acknowledgment of something that was now formally different from what it had been, the house, the accounts, the custody arrangement, the acknowledgment of Vanessa's conduct in the civil settlement that had been reached the previous month.It took forty minutes. My legal lead said it had gone smoothly, by which he meant no complications, no last minute objections, n

Ayesha's POVDecember arrived the way it always did in this city, not gradually but all at once, the cold settling in overnight between November and the first week of the new month as though a decision had been made somewhere without consultation. The gallery felt different in December, warmer in contrast to the street outside, and people moved through it with the slightly slower quality of people who had stepped in from cold air and were in no particular hurry to return to it.I had learned over two years of running the space that December was its own kind of exhibition, the gallery becoming a place people visited not only for the work on the walls but for the specific quality of a room that was warm and quiet and asked nothing of you except that you look. I had stopped fighting this secondary purpose and started working with it, choosing December showings that rewarded unhurried attention, work that benefited from someone standing in front of it longer than they might otherwise have

Ayesha's POVPatricia called on a Thursday morning in February at half past ten, which was a time I associated with calls that had something definitive to deliver because Patricia did not call at half past ten to discuss process. She called at half past ten when the process had concluded."The decree absolute has been issued," she said. "As of today the marriage is formally dissolved."I was at my desk. The gallery was quiet, the morning light doing what it did in February, pale and honest, coming through the tall windows at the angle that made everything look slightly more considered than it was."Thank you, Patricia," I said."The full documentation will be with you by end of day," she said. "Is there anything else you need from me right now.""No," I said. "I think that covers everything."We said goodbye with the professional warmth of two women who had been through something significant together and who both understood that the significance was not the kind that required ceremony

Chris's POVI went to the gallery on a Saturday morning in May, a year to the month since I had left the house, which I was aware of as a fact without having chosen it as a symbolic date. It simply happened to be May when I was ready, and May it was.I had been ready, in the sense of having done enough of the work to be in the room without the old machinery running, for approximately three months. I had not come sooner because I had learned, through the preceding year, that readiness was not sufficient justification for arrival. She had not asked me to come. She had not indicated in any of our co-parenting interactions, which were consistent and civil and focused on Iris, that there was a door open for any other kind of conversation.The decision to come was mine and I had examined it from every direction I could access before acting on it. Dr. Osei had not told me not to come. He had also not told me to come. He had said that I would know when the work had produced enough clarity to

Ayesha's POVThe restaurant I chose was the Italian place around the corner from Ken's studio building, the one with the wooden tables and the bread that arrived without being asked for and the particular warmth of a room that had been feeding people for thirty years and had learned, in that time, exactly what a good evening required. I had chosen it deliberately, not only because the food was excellent but because it was his neighborhood rather than mine, and choosing his neighborhood felt like the honest signal of what the evening was, which was not a gallery meeting or a professional coffee but something I was finally allowing myself to call by its proper name.I arrived five minutes before seven and was shown to a table by the window, and I sat and looked at the street outside in the early May dark and thought about the day that had just passed, about Chris in the gallery that morning and the specific quality of the ending that conversation had represented, and about the call with