3 months later, I woke to sunlight streaming through bedroom windows I'd forgotten to close and reached automatically for someone who wasn't there anymore. The muscle memory of marriage still twitching, still reaching, still hoping, despite everything, that the last 90 days had been a particularly vivid nightmare. But the empty space beside me was real. The divorce papers filed in January were real. The 7,030 asset split was real.
Rachel's signature on settlement documents was real. The end of my marriage was as real as the morning sun. I went downstairs. My stairs now in my house paid for with my 70% of our assets and made coffee in a kitchen that still felt too big for one person. Outside, February snow fell soft and silent, covering the driveway where Rachel's suitcase had once rolled.
The walkway where she'd stood. Dripping rain and lies. The street where her car had driven away for the last time. My phone showed two text messages from David. Breakfast I'm buying.
From Sandra. Final documents are ready for review. Stop by the office when you can. Final documents. The last administrative detail of a dissolved marriage.
The period at the end of a sentence that had run on far too long. I texted David Rosy's Diner. 9:00 a.m. Then I showered, dressed, and drove through snow quiet streets to meet my best friend for breakfast enclosure. David was already there when I arrived, sitting in a booth by the window, two cups of coffee going cold between his hands.
He looked up when I slid in across from him, studied my face with the practiced eye of someone who'd been watching me barely hold it together for months. "You look better," he said. "I look the same. " "No, you actually look better. Less," he gestured vaguely at my face. Less haunted, less like you're one bad day away from a complete breakdown.
Maybe I already had my breakdown and you missed it. Did you? I thought about it about the nights I'd spent staring at ceiling cracks. The mornings I'd forgotten to eat. The weeks that had blurred together into undifferentiated grief.
I don't know. Maybe. Or maybe I'm still having it. Just very slowly. The waitress came.
Rosie herself, 60s and cigarette voiced and kind. The usual. James. I realized I've been coming here often enough to have a usual. Yeah, thanks, Rosie.
She patted my shoulder. That universal gesture of I heard about your divorce and I'm sorry, then went to put in my order. Everyone in town knows, I said to David. Small towns are like that. Secrets don't last.