Then you have a funny way of showing it. She signed four places, her signature getting messier each time, her tears smudging the ink. When she was done, she pushed the papers back to me. I'll be out of the house completely by next week, she said. I'll just take my clothes and personal things.
You can have everything else. I don't want everything else. I want to split things fairly. This isn't about punishing you, Rachel. It's about ending this, honestly.
She stood up, looked around the dining room like she was seeing it for the last time. For what it's worth, I really am sorry. You deserved better than this. Better than me? Yeah, I said.
I did. She walked to the door, paused with her hand on the knob. The question yesterday about the illness. There really isn't one. No, go then.
Why? Because I needed you to feel what I felt when I found out. The fear, the uncertainty, the sick dread of knowing something terrible had happened. And not knowing how bad it would be. I needed you to run to a doctor and beg for tests and sit in a waiting room imagining the worst.
Because that's what I did, Rachel. When I found out about you and Marcus, I went to a clinic and got tested for every STD they offer because you'd been sleeping with me and him and I had no idea what I've been exposed to. I met her eyes. I wanted you to feel that just for a few hours just to understand. She pulled it.
Did you? Were you? I'm clean, negative for everything. But I had to live with that fear for a week while I waited for results. And you should know what that feels like.
You should carry that weight, even if just for a moment. She nodded slowly, open the door, walked out. This time, I knew it was for the last time as my wife. Next time she'd come back, it would be to pack boxes, to sort through the debris of our life together, to figure out who got the coffee maker and who got the photos from our honeymoon. But that would be later.
That would be the mechanical practical end of things. This this had been the emotional end, the moment where our marriage officially died, documented and divided and done. I sat alone at the dining room table, surrounded by folders of evidence, holding divorce papers with her signature still wet, and I felt nothing. Not relief, not satisfaction, not even grief, just emptiness, just the hollow echo of what used to be. My phone buzzed.
A text from David. How did it go? I looked around the room at the chair where Rachel had sat at the folder she'd read at the dissolution of 12 years reduced to signatures on legal documents. It's done. I typed back phase one complete because this wasn't over.