Thirty Days
1250 Words
The lawyer's office smelled like new carpet and old coffee, and the woman behind the desk had a handshake firmer than mine had been in years, firmer than I remembered my own being back when I still had a career and a name that belonged only to me.
"Mrs. Cole," she said, and I flinched at my own married name. "I'm Patricia Reyes. Nina says you need to move quickly."
"I don't know what I need," I admitted. "I've never done this before."
"Most people haven't, until suddenly they have to." She waved me into the chair and glanced at a folder already sitting open on her desk, thicker than it had any right to be for someone who'd only walked in that morning. "I did some digging after Nina's call last night. I want to be honest with you, because you deserve that even if nobody else in your life is offering it."
My stomach dropped. "What did you find?"
"Julian Cole filed for divorce four hours ago." She said it was plain. "Before you did. Before you'd even had a chance to talk to anyone."
The room tilted. "He filed? While I was sitting on Nina's couch?"
"At two in the morning, according to the timestamp. Someone on his legal team was working fast, which tells me this wasn't a spontaneous decision. It was already prepared, waiting for a reason to be used."
I thought of him sitting outside Nina's building for six hours, texting me about explanations, while his lawyers filed paperwork behind my back in the dark. The betrayal from the hotel suite folded into a second, colder one, and I didn't know anymore which one hurt worse.
"What does the filing actually say?" I managed, my voice barely above a whisper.
"Irreconcilable differences." Patricia scanned the line with practiced eyes and looked up at me carefully, gauging my reaction. "Not adultery. Not misconduct of any kind. The mildest possible language available to a man in his position."
"That doesn't make any sense to me. I caught him with a woman in a hotel suite last night, Patricia. With my own eyes."
"Which is exactly why it doesn't make sense to me either," she said, tapping the page once. "If he wanted an easy, quiet exit, citing adultery against himself would still get him divorced quickly. Filing instead for irreconcilable differences tells me he's trying very hard to avoid something specific coming out in open court. Something he'd rather keep buried than admit it to publicly, even if it costs him."
I sat with that for a long moment. "You think he's protecting the woman."
"I think he's protecting something or someone. Whether that's a person or a piece of information, I honestly can't say yet." Patricia turned another page. "I need you to understand your position clearly, because it isn't a strong one on paper right now. Your prenuptial agreement is strict. If this divorce proceeds exactly as filed, on no-fault grounds, you walk away from this marriage with almost nothing beyond what's already explicitly listed as yours."
The floor seemed to drop another inch beneath my chair. "Almost nothing. After three years of my life."
"Unless we can establish grounds that override the prenup entirely. Fraud. Concealment. Infidelity, proven, not simply assumed." She closed the folder gently, as if the motion itself could soften the blow. "What you saw last night could matter enormously, if we can prove exactly what it actually was. Right now all we have is your account and a text message from a stranger telling you not to sign anything yet."
"You know about the texts already."
"Nina forwarded me screenshots first thing this morning, with your permission," she said. "Patricia's eyes stayed steady on mine. "Whoever is sending those messages clearly knows something you don't know yet. That could be a witness who genuinely wants to help you. It could also be someone playing a much longer game. I want you prepared for both possibilities."
My phone, sitting face-up on my knee, lit up at that exact moment, and I nearly threw it clear across the room out of pure reflection.
Julian: My lawyers filed last night. I know how that looks from where you're standing. I need you to know I didn't want it to happen that way. Please call me before you sign anything at all.
I turned the screen toward Patricia without a single word. She read it, her expression carefully unreadable, and reached for a fresh legal pad on the corner of her desk.
"Thirty days," she said, almost to herself, tapping the pad twice. "That's roughly how long we have before his filing becomes very difficult to contest on our terms instead of his. I need you to think hard, Amara, about every single detail from last night. Every word spoken. Every look that passed between him and that woman. Thirty days isn't long, and right now we're building an entire case out of a stranger's text messages and your memory of one terrible night."
I nodded, my throat too tight to speak, and for the first time since the hotel door swung open, I understood clearly that whatever came next wasn't going to be decided in one raw, bleeding moment of feeling. It was going to be decided in rooms exactly like this one, with folders and clocks and thirty days ticking steadily down, and I had no real idea yet whether I was fighting for the truth or simply fighting to survive the fallout of not knowing it.
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