HIS DISCARDED WIFE

CHAPTER 4- DIVORCED

I slept in my car outside a gas station because I didn't know where else to go.

The seatbelt buckle digs into my hip every time I shift. Every hour or so, I wake up certain my phone rang, and every time it hasn't.

Just my own pulse, loud enough to fool me.

By morning, my mouth tastes like metal, and my back has locked into a shape that isn't mine. I drove to the house anyway, because some part of me still believes doors can open twice.

The housekeeper lets me in without a word, her grip tight on the door handle a beat too long after I've already passed through. She already knows.

Jack's in the study. Coffee in hand. Dressed for work like today is a normal Tuesday and not the morning after.

"Can we talk? Alone."

He glances past me, checking for Beatrice, for Georgina, for anyone who might make this harder for him. Finding no one, he nods once.

"I can forgive it," I say, before he can sit down,

Before he can build a wall out of silence. "The affair. Georgina. Whatever happened before last night, whatever's been happening for months. I don't care anymore. I want my marriage back."

"You don't mean that."

"I do."

"You're saying it because you're scared."

"Maybe. So what? Being scared doesn't make it a lie."

He sets the coffee down without drinking it, and that small, careful motion tells me more than his face does.

"Do you remember our wedding?" I pressed on before he could answer. "You cried during your vows. Everyone laughed because you tried to hide it and couldn't hide it at all."

"Lauren."

"You held my hand at my father's funeral. You didn't let go for six hours. I remember because my fingers went numb, and I never once asked you to move."

"That was a different life."

"It was four years ago."

"It feels like a different life." He finally looks at me, and there's something almost like grief in it, gone as fast as it comes.

"The woman I married doesn't exist anymore, Lauren. You disappeared somewhere between the diagnosis and now, and I don't know how to find her."

"I'm right here."

"You're not. Not the way you were."

"So find a new way to look at me. That's what marriage is supposed to survive."

"Not everyone's built to survive it."

"You promised me you were."

He doesn't answer that either.

"Because I got sick." My voice cracks on the word, and I hate it, hate that he gets to see it crack. "You don't divorce someone for getting sick, Jack. You don't just decide the version of her that's inconvenient gets erased."

He doesn't answer that. The front door opens before he has to.

A man in a grey suit walks in without knocking. Folder under his arm. He doesn't look surprised to see me, which means he was told I might be here, which means this was planned further than I want to understand yet.

"Mr Roland. Documents are ready for your signature."

"What documents?"

Jack goes very still, coffee cup halfway back to the desk, like moving might make this more real than it already is. The lawyer sets the folder down and opens it the way you open something you've opened a hundred times before, for a hundred other marriages that ended exactly this way.

"When was this prepared?" I ask.

The lawyer's grip tightens on the folder's edge.

"I'd have to check the file."

"Check it now."

"Lauren, don't."

"I asked a simple question."

Nobody answers it. The silence answers it instead, and I understand, standing there, that this was never a conversation. It was a formality I walked into by accident.

The lawyer clears his throat, uncomfortable now, and shuffles the papers to have something to do with his hands.

"Wait until I finish treatment," I say. "That's all I'm asking."

"I can't do that."

"You mean you won't."

"I mean it's already done."

"Do you understand what you're asking me to sign? You're asking a woman who might not survive this year to sign away the only family she has left?

"Your illness isn't my responsibility anymore." He says it flat, like a fact he's already made peace with. "It hasn't been for a while."

"So when did you decide that? Was there a date? Did you write it down somewhere, the exact moment I stopped being your problem?"

He doesn't answer that.

My hand shakes so badly the pen skids across the first line.

I pressed down harder the second time and got it right.

I set the pen down. Nobody says congratulations. Nobody says anything at all.

As I gather my copy, my eyes catch the date stamped in the corner of the first page.

Four days ago.

I read it twice, certain I've made a mistake.

I haven't.

Four days ago, I was still in that hospital bed believing my husband was simply too busy to answer his phone.

I looked up at Jack. He doesn't look away this time. He doesn't deny it either.

He knew. Before I ever walked through that bedroom door and found him with Georgina, he had already decided I was leaving.

The affair wasn't the reason.

It was the excuse.

And as I walk out of that house for the second time in twelve hours, one question follows me down every step of the driveway, louder than anything Beatrice said, louder than the lock turning last night.

What happened to the man who once cried at

His own wedding, that made him so certain I deserved to be thrown away?