His to Forget, Hers to Reclaim

CHAPTER FOUR—Watch Me

Mia watched the pen make its last, steady line on the paper. The ink made a small curl at the end of her signature. It was done. Her hand didn't shake. Her eyes didn't feel like crying. There was just a quiet, crisp sound on the document that felt like the end. Their story was over. Her story with him was finished.

She stood up. The papers felt lighter than she expected. The clerk gave a kind of sad smile they probably gave everyone. Mia smiled back a little, a tight smile that didn't really show in her eyes, and walked out of the courthouse. She didn't look back. Not even a quick glance.

The air outside felt dry and a little rough on her face. The sun was bright but didn't feel warm or comforting. It was just there. And somehow, that felt right to her. It felt like the empty feeling in her chest, a numbness that she didn't mind, like a coat on a cold day.

Later, a box with Ethan's things was on the seat next to her in the car. This could actually be the last time she may be seeing her son. Jack wasn't home when she got there. Vanessa answered the door.

Vanessa's eyebrows, which were painted perfectly, went up in surprise for a quick moment. Then they went back down into a familiar, smug smile. She leaned against the door, her arms crossed over a sweater that looked very soft.

Mia didn’t speak. What was there to say? Every word felt heavy. She just held out the box. It felt surprisingly heavy, like she was giving up something real. A small, quiet smile touched her lips, a farewell, not to Vanessa, but to this chapter of her life. Then, she turned and walked back to her car.

“He misses you,” Vanessa’s voice called after her. Her voice was sweet in a fake way that made Mia want to grit her teeth.

Mia kept walking. Her heels on the driveway were like little acts of saying no. She got into the driver's seat. She could still smell Ethan's dinosaur stickers a little bit in the air. She didn't look back as she drove away.

The next morning, her thumb went over the numbers on her phone. A new phone number. Clean. Not touched by the past. She pressed 'yes' and felt a strange light feeling, like something holding her back had been cut.

Jack's name showed up on the screen. Block. It felt almost… Satisfying. Old voicemails. She scrolled through the list, Ethan singing "Happy Birthday." Delete. She erased it all. Let them disappear online.

The weight of the gold band felt heavy in her palm as she laid it on the pawn shop counter. The man behind the thick glass barely looked at it. “Two hundred,” he said. Less than she’d expected. Less than it cost. Less than the promises it had symbolized. She nodded. She didn’t argue. What was the use?

The moving truck made noise as it drove down the highway, carrying the things left of her old life. She found the apartment online. It was very small. One bedroom. On the edge of the city. Nothing fancy. Just a building where people lived their normal lives. The stairs made noise when you walked on them. Neighbors who nodded hello but didn't talk much.

She liked it.

It didn't smell like his aftershave. You couldn't hear Ethan's happy laughter there. The walls didn't have any memories, no reminders of what used to be.

Her mattress arrived rolled in plastic, smelling faintly of chemicals and new beginnings. For two nights, she slept on the bare floor. The hard floor felt strangely good. It was firm. Unyielding. Unlike the life she’d just dismantled.

Coffee brewed in the silence of her small kitchen. Toast was eaten standing over the sink, each bite a solitary act of survival. Her interactions were limited to the polite nods of delivery drivers and the quiet greetings of the old man next door, whose mismatched socks were the brightest spot in her day.

She was a blank page. A new file. MIA Holdings. The name just popped into her head one night when she couldn't sleep.

The days turned into weeks. Research became her obsession. Cold emails to CEOs vanished online. Proposals drafted in noisy cafes got no answers. Tutorials played on her laptop screen late at night. Free online courses filled the silence. She was building something, a fragile framework of an idea.

No one cared about a single mom who hadn't worked for a while because of her broken marriage and who didn't have fancy tech degrees. They thought she was a risk. Not steady.

But she knew something they didn't. She knew how much it hurt to be erased. She knew the feeling of your online self being something anyone could use, a path for anyone to follow.

So she wrote code. Lines of complicated words and symbols grew on her computer screen late at night. She didn't sleep much. The sadness for Ethan was always with her, a quiet ache in her chest. But she didn't call. What could she say to Jack? And she wouldn’t want Ethan to hear how quiet and empty things had become between her and Jack.

Odd jobs helped her pay for the electricity. Data entry for a former colleague. Freelance copy edits for a friend of a friend, polishing words that weren’t her own. Her hair grew longer and messier. She bought cheap scissors and trimmed it herself in the bathroom mirror. A YouTube video taught her how to fix the persistent drip under the sink. The tool she borrowed felt heavy in her hand.

The numbers on the scale dropped. Sleep became a luxury she couldn’t afford. But every night, her computer screen glowed, like a light in the dark. She kept going.

Rejection emails piled up in her folder.

She titled the folder “Watch me.”

Then, one Tuesday morning, while she was leaning over her laptop, trying to debug a particularly stubborn line of code, a notification pinged on her phone. A text message from her bank.