After the divorce

chapter 3: She Is Gone

Damien got home a little after nine, later than he'd planned, his mind still tangled in the numbers from the afternoon's board meeting. He shrugged off his coat in the entryway and listened for the small sounds that usually told him Amelia was home — the television murmuring in the background, water running in the kitchen, her humming something under her breath while she cooked.

There was nothing.

"Amelia?"

The apartment answered him with silence.

He told himself she was probably still at the clinic, or out with a friend, blowing off steam after last night. He deserved that much, he thought — a little distance, a little cold shoulder. He poured himself a drink and sat down to wait.

By eleven, the drink was gone and the silence had started to feel less like distance and more like absence.

He went looking, not sure what he expected to find. Her side of the closet still held most of her clothes, which should have reassured him, except that when he pulled open her nightstand drawer out of some instinct he didn't examine too closely, he found her wedding ring sitting there, neatly placed on top of a folded tissue, as if she had taken care setting it down even in the middle of walking out of his life.

He stood there holding it for a long time.

Sophia found him like that when she let herself in an hour later with the key he'd given her weeks ago, a bottle of champagne tucked under her arm like they had something to celebrate.

"She's gone," Sophia said, and there was no mistaking the lightness in her voice, quick and bright, like a held breath finally released. "Damien, she's actually gone. This is what we wanted."

"I don't remember wanting this," Damien said.

Something in his tone made Sophia's smile falter, just slightly, before she smoothed it back into place. "You wanted the truth. I gave it to you."

He didn't answer her. He turned the ring over in his fingers instead, and for reasons he couldn't fully name, he found he didn't want to put it down.

He didn't sleep. Around two in the morning, some restless, unexamined impulse sent him back through his phone, scrolling through old messages, old photos — Amelia laughing at something off-camera, Amelia asleep against his shoulder on a flight home from a trip they'd taken two years ago, before things between them had gone quiet and strange. He told himself he was only checking whether she'd tried to contact him. He wasn't sure that was true.

By morning, the unease had hardened into something he couldn't shake, a low, persistent hum underneath everything he did. He canceled his first two meetings. He called her phone four times and got her voicemail four times. He told himself this was ridiculous, that a grown woman was entitled to disappear for a day after a divorce, that this wasn't his problem anymore.

He went to the clinic where she worked anyway.

The receptionist recognized him — of course she did, he'd picked Amelia up from work more times than he could count over the years — and her face did something complicated when he asked for her.

"Mr. Blackwood," she said carefully, "Amelia hasn't been in. There was… we heard she was in an accident. Two nights ago. She was hit by a car."

The words didn't fully land at first. Damien heard them the way a person hears something underwater, distorted, delayed.

"An accident," he repeated. "Where. Which hospital."

The receptionist hesitated, glancing at her computer screen as though it might tell her how much she was allowed to say. "I only know what I heard. Someone said she was taken to a private facility. The Hart Group's medical center, I think."

"The Hart Group has a medical center?"

"It's not open to the public," the receptionist said. "I don't know how she ended up there. I don't know anyone who could get admitted there without—" She stopped herself, seeming to realize she'd said more than she meant to.

Damien was already moving, phone in hand, calling his driver, his mind spinning through calculations that made less and less sense the more he turned them over. An accident. Two nights ago — the same night. The same night he'd handed her divorce papers and watched her walk out the door without a single word of protest, without a single tear.

He thought of the ring in his coat pocket, where he'd put it that morning without quite deciding to.

He thought of what she'd told him, right before she signed.

I'm pregnant.

He had been so certain she was lying. He had been so certain, and so eager to believe the worst of her, because believing the worst was easier than sitting with the possibility that he had been wrong about everything — about Sophia, about the story he'd been fed, about the wife he had stopped really looking at somewhere along the way.

"Take me to Hart Private Medical Center," he told his driver, and his voice came out rougher than he intended. "Now."

The drive across the city felt endless. Damien stared out the window without really seeing the streets passing by, his mind cycling through the same handful of images on an unbearable loop — Amelia's face when she'd told him, calm and steady, the way it never occurred to him a liar would sound; Sophia's small, satisfied exhale the moment the door closed behind her; the wedding ring sitting neatly on a folded tissue, placed there with more care than he felt he deserved.

He thought about calling his lawyer to ask whether the papers had even been filed yet, whether there was some technicality, some window still open before the divorce became irreversible. He thought better of it. It felt, suddenly, obscene to be thinking about paperwork while a woman he had failed so completely might be lying in a hospital bed somewhere in the city, alone, because he hadn't believed a single word she'd told him.

His phone buzzed. A message from Sophia: Everything okay? You left in a hurry.

He stared at it for a long moment before turning the screen face-down on the seat beside him, an instinct he didn't examine too closely, and didn't answer.