CHAPTER 001: NOT YOUR WIFE
CHAPTER 001: “Not Your Wife”
**Claire
I used to love the smell of fresh paper.
As a little girl I would press my nose into the pages of new notebooks before I wrote a single word in them, and my mother thought it was strange but I thought it was the smell of possibility — of all the things that hadn’t been said yet, all the versions of myself I hadn’t become yet. I know better now.
Some papers smells like the end of everything you thought your life would be, and the divorce papers was one of them.
Bryan slid across the conference table that morning smelled exactly like that.
I noticed it before before the fifty-floor view of Manhattan spread out grey and indifferent below us,
They are two lawyers sitting stiff on either side of a table long enough to land a small aircraft on.
Bryan himself, was already seated at the far end in the charcoal suit I had always loved on him — the one I had pressed my face against in a Paris hotel corridor once, breathing him in and thinking, this is home, this man is the one for me. Bryan is the real definition of men will stain your white.
He didn’t even look up when I walked in and that small failure should have meant nothing after everything,
But it still landed somewhere tender. My chest clenched — I had learned to how hide my feeling but it’s not that easy.
I pressed my hands flat against my thighs beneath the table and told myself to breathe, Made a promise I was not going to fall apart in this room, not in front of him, my dignity is the only thing I had left to protect.
His lawyer spoke, walked through the terms. I heard perhaps a third of it because the rest of my attention was on Bryan’s hands folded perfectly on the tabletop
Those careful hands that had held my face once like I was something worth cherishing forever. and I was memorising them , trust me I didn’t mean to,
The way am leaving this place, will never come back
When the lawyer paused Bryan finally looked at me and I had been preparing for that moment the entire cab ride over, rehearsing my composure,
His grey eyes moved across my face slow and searching the way they always had, and some stupid unkillable part of me rose up like a tide and thought he was going to stop this, that he was going to look at me and remember what we were and say he had made a mistake. Instead he reached for his pen instead. “You should sign, Claire,” he said quietly, the way you speak to someone you’ve already finished with. “This is the best outcome for both of us.”
My mouth opened and I don’t know what was going to come out , maybe something that would have cost me every last piece of dignity I had carried into that room — but he spoke first.
“You were never fit to be my wife.” He said it plainly, like he has known for a long time and is only now permitting himself to say it out loud. Then his eyes moved over me, slow and deliberate, and something l recognised that had passed between us in the dark for two years and to think I had spent two years mistaking what I had with him for love. “But God,” his voice again you were good in bed.”
The room went absolutely silent. My lawyer made a small strangled sound beside me.
I picked up the pen and signed my name on every line they had marked. That was the height of it. I slid the papers back to the centre of the table, stood up, picked up my bag the camel leather bag I had bought with my own money the week before our wedding, the last truly mine thing I’d owned before his world swallowed mine whole.
I looked at Bryan Daniels one last time. I held his gaze long enough for him to see that I was not broken, then I said goodbye and I walked out.
I made it through the lobby, past the doorman who had called me Mrs. Daniels for two years and nodded at me the way he always did, and I didn’t correct him.
I walked out onto Fifth Avenue into the cold and kept walking until I found an alley between a dry cleaner and a bodega and pressed my back against the brick wall and fell apart. Not loudly — that’s what nobody tells you about real grief, that it isn’t loud, it moves through you like water through a cracked thing and you cry silently, your whole body shaking with the effort of making no sound, because even with no one watching some part of you is still trying to hold yourself together.
I cried for the girl who believed in possibility. I cried for the woman who had stood at an altar and meant every word. I cried for the two years I had spent making myself smaller for a man who looked at me today and saw nothing worth keeping. I cried until there was nothing left and then I wiped my face with the back of my hand, straightened up, smoothed my coat, picked up my bag and walked back out onto Fifth Avenue.
That was the last time I cried over Bryan Daniels.
I didn’t know then that grief, if you survive it, becomes something else entirely. I didn’t know that the woman who walked out of that alley was already becoming someone he wouldn’t recognise, someone he would spend years trying to reach. I didn’t know he would beg. I only knew one thing, standing on that sidewalk with my ruined mascara and my spine straight and two years of my life folded into fifty pages of legal paper — I was not finished.
Trust me I wasn’t coming for revenge, he is not worth it.
It was never in my plan. I had a better plan for myself
Because I thought I was done with Bryan Daniel’s.
