AFTER DIVORCE

Chapter One: Buzz Buzz Buzz. Buzz. The sound slowly pulled me out of sleep, distant at first, then closer until it became impossible to ignore. I reached for my phone with my eyes still closed, fingers patting the nightstand until they found it. I squinted at the screen. A f*******: notification. A message. Pictures. I almost put it back down. But something made me look. The screen was bright against the darkness of the room. My eyes were still blurry with sleep, and for a moment, I genuinely couldn't make out what I was seeing. I brought the phone closer and blinked several times. A man's bare chest. A woman's arm draped across it. Two people tangled together in hotel sheets like they had been there all night. I sat up. I pressed the heel of my palm against my eyes and rubbed hard, hoping to clear my vision and make sense of what I was seeing. I looked at the screen again. My husband's face. The phone slipped in my grip. I caught it with both hands. My fingers were shaking. I could barely breathe as I stared at the image on the screen, hoping it would somehow change. It was Edward. My husband. But the most shocking part was the woman beside him. She was his ex. Another notification dropped. "Doubting ur eyes? Starlight Hotel room 032. Come for confirmation bitch." The pictures and messages were from Sandra, Edward's ex. I was out of the bed before I knew my legs had moved. I don't know what I grabbed on my way to the door. I shoved my feet into whatever shoes were nearby without looking. My keys were hanging by the door, and I grabbed them before rushing outside into the cold night air. I hurried to the car, started the engine, and sped away. My hands gripped the steering wheel, but my mind was still back in that bedroom, still staring at that screen, trying to find a different explanation, to find a way that those pictures meant anything other than what they clearly meant. I couldn't find one. The Starlight Hotel. I knew exactly where it was. Everyone in this city knew where it was. I drove there in twelve minutes and I don't remember a single second of it. --- The lobby was quiet at that hour. Bright and clean and almost empty. A young receptionist looked up from behind the front desk, a professional smile already in place. "Good morning, ma'am. How can I help you?" "I'm here to see someone," I said. "Room 032." The smile remained, but something shifted behind it. "Do you have an appointment with the guest?" "I'm family." He looked at me for a moment. "Ma'am, I'm going to need to call the room first and let them know you're here.” "Please don't do that." My voice came out quieter than I intended. "It's... it's a surprise. Please." He studied my face. Whatever he saw there made him pause. Then he glanced down at his screen, typed something, and told me the floor. "Thank you," I said. "Thank you so much." I walked to the lift before he could change his mind. --- The corridor was long, carpeted, and eerily quiet. All I could hear was the low hum of the building, my footsteps and my own uneven breathing. 31. 32. I stopped. The door was open–just barely, a thin strip of darkness at the edge where the latch hadn't caught. The door was slightly open, as though someone had been expecting me. My stomach turned over. I put my fingers flat against the door and pushed it slowly. The room was dim, but enough light slipped through the curtains for me to see the bed. Edward on his back. Eyes closed. Face completely relaxed and soft the way it only gets in deep sleep, the face I had looked at across our pillow for four years. And Sandra curled into his side like she belonged there. Her head rested on his chest. Her arm lay across his stomach, and her eyes were open. Looking straight at me. She didn't flinch. She didn't even look bothered that I had caught her with my husband. She just held my gaze and used the corner of her mouth to pull up a slow smile. Unhurried. Deliberate. The smile of someone who had waited a long time for this moment, so certain she would win, and now watching everything unfold exactly as she had imagined. I remained in the doorway, unable to feel anything but a strange emptiness. It felt like an eternity, though it couldn't have been more than a few seconds. My feet would not move and my mouth would not open and everything inside me had gone completely quiet in a way that was much worse than noise. Then I finally forced myself to move. I reached out and pulled the door shut. The latch caught with a soft click. I walked back down the corridor and pressed the button for the lift. When the doors closed, I stared at my reflection in the polished metal and barely recognized the woman looking back at me. --- I barely remember the drive home. My mind was consumed by what I had just seen, and all I wanted was to escape the memory of it. "Business trip, sunshine. Back by the weekend. Don't wait up." Those were his exact words before he left on his so-called business trip. I got home quickly and rushed from the car toward the front stairs. My knees hit the floor. And then everything I had been holding together since the moment that phone buzzed on my nightstand came apart all at once. Not tears, not at first, something that started much deeper than tears and tore its way up and out of me before I could stop it. A loud, broken cry escaped me. I covered my mouth with both hands, as though that could somehow contain the pain. The sound of someone completely broken. Two days. He had been away from home for two days. The night before, I had made his favourite dinner and left it covered on the stove, waiting for him to come home. Not knowing he had been in that hotel room. With her. Sleeping like a baby. While I waited. A few days earlier, he had kissed my forehead before leaving and promised that the trip was strictly business and would take at least three days” and I had waited anyway because that was what I had always done, and now I was on the floor at the front of the stairs at three in the morning with my whole chest ripped open and the only question burning through all of it was the one I didn't have an answer to yet. How long? How long had this been going on? How many business trips? How many times had he kissed my forehead and walked out that door all in the name of business and I had stood there and watched him go and thought, I actually thought, It was truly business. That thought alone made me cry harder. I stayed awake until 5 a.m., heartbroken and thinking about my marriage to Edward. When another message notification appeared on my phone screen, this time from Edward. “Hey, baby. Missing me? You won't have to miss me for much longer. Your baby is coming right home to you. I love you so much.” I was still staring at my phone screen when a knock at the door startled me. I was scared to open the door because I thought someone had followed me from the hotel. I was still deciding whether I should open the door or not when a familiar voice interr upted me. “Why would a full-time lazy-ass wife still be sleeping at this time?” I recognized the voice immediately. It was Margaret. Edward's mother. —