All Chapters of Divorcing Him Before Christmas : Chapter 1 - Chapter 6

LIORA“One more Christmas without you in my arms. I am doing my best to endure.”The lines sat near the bottom of the page, in my husband’s handwriting.I froze.The paper was thick and cream, and it had gone soft along its folds. At the top was a date in the neat, slanted figures he used for contracts. Eight days ago.The watch box slid from my fingers and landed on the carpet without a sound.That was Dorian’s hand. And that was not a letter to me.For a moment, I couldn’t move. The clock on his bookshelf ticked. Blood rushed in my ears, and heat climbed painfully into my face.Above the lines was her name. Seraphine. I wasn’t sure if it was dust that had flown into my eyes but it blinked even faster and my eyes felt wet.Endure. That was the word he had chosen for the five years he had spent beside me.On our FIFTH wedding anniversary, the fourteenth of December. I sat on the floor of my husband’s study and learned that he had been writing to another woman since the morning I beca

LIORAIt takes less than a second to learn where a man keeps his heart. It is wherever his eyes go first.Dorian’s went to her.I don’t think anyone else in the hall noticed. They were too busy swallowing their laughter and pretending it had never been there. But I noticed, because I had spent five years training myself to notice the exact things about my husband that I was not supposed to.Seraphine recovered first, or rather, she began to perform recovering.She rose with one hand at her throat and her eyes already wet, and she did not come toward me. She stepped sideways, into the curve of Dorian’s arm, as though I were the thing in the room that might bite.“Liora,” she breathed. “Oh, Liora, I had no idea you would… I’m so sorry. We weren’t…” She let the sentence fall apart on purpose, prettily, and looked up at him. “Dorian, I should go.”“You’re not going anywhere.” He said it to her, with his whole body turned to her, before he said one word to me.I felt that land somewhere un

LIORAI had meant to wait. I had promised myself thirty days. I had not promised myself a morning like this one.He did not laugh. He did not say I was being unreasonable like I expected. He went very still, and then, to my surprise, he looked around the room first, at the waiter, the next table, the door, as though checking for witnesses.“Not now,” he said quietly.“Not now?”“I was going to talk to you myself,” he said, almost to himself. “After the holidays. Properly, with everything arranged.” He caught himself, and set his jaw. “Seraphine is home through the holidays. It’s a delicate time, Liora. There would be talk. People would say the marriage ended the moment she landed, and I won’t do that to her.”To her.So that was the sentence from the drawer. A timetable to end everything we shared. Somewhere inside me, the last thing that had been listening for an apology went quiet.“We’ve been together for five years,” he went on, reasonable, almost tender, and reached across the l