The Last Day
1250 Words
I woke before my alarm. The apartment was silent except for the refrigerator humming in the kitchen.
The contract still lay where I'd left it, beside the notebook with two words and a lot of crossed-out lines.
I made coffee out of habit, then forgot about it standing at the window watching the morning traffic.
The street below was already busy. People walking to work, a bus pulling away from the curb, a woman arguing with someone on the phone.
None of them knew today was the day.
The coffee went cold on the counter, untouched.
My phone rings around nine. Mom.
“How's work going?” she asks, like this is any other Tuesday.
“Fine. Busy.”
“Are you eating? You sound thin.”
“Mom, you can't hear weight through a phone.”
She laughs, and for a few minutes it's easy, the two of us talking about nothing the way we used to before everything got complicated.
She tells me about the neighbor's new dog. I tell her about a client meeting that went long. Ordinary things. The kind of conversation I didn't realize I missed until we were having it again.
Then, almost like she's tacking it onto the end of the call, “Oh, I have another appointment at the clinic next week. It's nothing serious.”
“What kind of appointment?”
“Just a follow-up. Don't worry about it.”
She's always said that. Every single time, since I was old enough to notice her hiding things from me to keep me from worrying.
“Mom.”
“I'm fine, Ariella. Really.”
I don't believe her, but I let it go, because pushing has never once worked with her.
The phone stayed in my hand long after the call ended. My eyes drifted back to the contract.
The timing feels almost cruel.
Lena lets herself in around eleven, no text first, no warning. She takes one look at the untouched coffee and the contract still sitting there and doesn't ask if I've decided.
She goes to the kitchen, pours the cold coffee down the sink, and starts a fresh pot without asking if I want one.
“If Robert had no money,” she says instead, dropping onto the chair across from me, “would you still marry him?”
“No.”
She nods slowly. “Then don't lie to yourself about why you're considering this.”
It isn't an accusation. It's just true, and hearing it out loud makes something in my chest loosen a little.
“If Xavier had chosen you,” she asks next, quieter, “would you still be sitting here?”
“No,” I whisper.
Neither of us says anything for a moment. The new coffee finishes brewing behind her, filling the kitchen with a smell neither of us pays attention to.
“If you're doing this just to prove something to Xavier, don't,” Lena says. “He isn't worth it. But if you're doing it because it gets your life moving again... that's different.”
She doesn't say anything else after that. She just gets up, pours two cups, and sets one in front of me like the conversation is over.
After she leaves, I sit alone with the contract for a long time.
This time I'm not picturing Xavier's face across the ballroom, or Elena's ring, or any of it.
I think about my mother's next appointment. About the leak in my parents' roof that never gets fixed because there's never enough left over. About the woman I want to be a year from now, and whether she's someone who kept waiting, or someone who moved.
I wasn't signing for love. And I wasn't signing for revenge. I was choosing the only future that still felt like mine.
The pen felt heavier than it should have.
Ariella Romano.
No music. No tears. Just the sound of the pen against paper, and then nothing.
I sit there staring at my own name for a long time.
It's done.
I call Robert instead of waiting for him to call me. He answers on the first ring.
“I've made my decision,” I say.
He doesn't celebrate. “Are you certain?”
I looked at my signature.
“No,” I admitted. “But waiting won't make me any surer.”
“I'll send Adrian to collect you this evening,” he says, and that's the whole conversation. No speeches. No congratulations. Just business, the way it was always going to be.
Packing takes less time than I thought it would. Two suitcases, most of it clothes and the few things that actually matter.
I fold in the framed photo of my parents from their wedding day, the one where my father still had all his hair and my mother's dress didn't quite fit right because they couldn't afford alterations.
In the back of my closet I find a shoebox I'd forgotten about.
At the bottom lies one of Xavier's old hoodies. I hold it for a second before folding it back into the box. Once, I'd worn it whenever he was away. Now it smells more like an old closet than him.
There's other things in there too, ticket stubs, a few photos, a note in his handwriting, but none of it pulls at me the way the hoodie does.
I sit on the floor with the box in my lap longer than I mean to.
Then I set the whole box by the door with the trash.
Not angrily. Just done.
Before I leave, I walk through the apartment one last time.
This place held the best years of my life with Xavier, and then the worst night of my life without him, and now this. Whatever this turns out to be.
I switch off the lights and lock the door behind me.
Lena is waiting by the stairs. I press the spare key into her hand.
“I don't know when I'll be back.”
“Then I'll water your plants until you do,” she says, and it's such a small, ordinary thing to say that it almost undoes me.
She hugs me. Neither of us cries. Neither of us needs to.
A black car is already waiting at the curb when I step outside. A man in a dark suit gets out, unhurried, professional.
“Mrs. Romano,” he says.
“For a few more minutes,” I say, and something almost like a smile crosses his face.
“Adrian Vale,” he says. “Mr. Rothwell asked me to drive you.”
The name Rothwell sits strangely in the air between us. I don't correct him.
He opens the rear door. I take one last look at the building behind me, the window of the apartment I've lived in since college, the fire escape Lena and I used to sit on in the summer.
Then I get in.
The seats are leather, cool against the back of my legs. Adrian shuts the door with a soft click, rounds the car, and slides in behind the wheel without a word.
As the building disappeared in the rear window, I rested my forehead against the glass. Home slipped out of sight, and for the first time in days, there was no turning back.
I didn't know what was waiting for me behind the gates of Rothwell Mansion.
I only knew there was nothing left waiting for me here.
- Writer
