The BILLIONAIRES OBSESSION

Eva's POV The watch was expensive. I had saved four months to buy it and I was still holding the velvet box when I pushed open our bedroom door. Ken was in our bed. Sarah was with him. I stood there and looked at them and the box slipped out of my hand and hit the floor. The sound it made was small. Almost nothing. But it was loud enough that Ken turned his head and saw me standing in the doorway. Sarah grabbed the sheet. Ken sat up slowly, like I was the one interrupting something reasonable. "Eva," he said coldly, eyes fixed on me with clear disdain. Just my name said. Nothing behind it. No guilt, no panic… "How long," I said. "Let's not do this tonight." "How long, Ken." He exhaled. Long and slow, like I was exhausting him. "A year." A year. I looked at Sarah and she looked at the wall. She couldn't look at me. We had been friends since college. She had stood beside me in a pale blue dress on my wedding day and cried and told me she had never seen me look so beautiful. She had sat at my table and eaten my food and laughed at my jokes for a year while she was doing this, and now she couldn't look at me. That hurt worse than Ken. "Get out of my house," I said to her. She gathered her things fast and slipped past me in the doorway without a word and I heard the front door close and then it was just me and Ken and the ruined bed and the velvet box on the floor. He reached into the nightstand and pulled out a thick envelope and set it on the duvet. "What is that?" I asked. "Papers. I had them drawn up two weeks ago. Sign them tonight and we both move on clean." Two weeks ago. I stood there and let that land. He had been walking around our home for two weeks with divorce papers in his briefcase. Eating dinner across from me. Sleeping beside me. Looking me in the face every morning like everything was exactly what it was supposed to be. "You were going to sit me down this weekend," I said. "Eva." "That was the plan. Sit me down this weekend and hand me the papers." "Don't make this into something it isn't." "I'm not making it into anything. I just want to understand who I was living with for five years." He stood up and crossed the room and stopped close enough that I had to look up at him. Ken was tall and he used that when he needed to. His voice dropped. "Sign the papers. The house is in my name. The accounts are in my name. The car is in my name. If you make this difficult, I will make sure you walk out of here with exactly what you came in with, which was nothing. If you sign tonight, we do this clean and you keep your dignity." I looked at him for a long time. I thought about the four months of saving. I thought about the six times I walked past the jeweler's window before I finally went in. I thought about every dinner I cooked and every argument I swallowed and every time my mother said he was too cold and I told her she was wrong. Then I picked up the pen from the nightstand and I signed every page he had marked without reading a single word. When I was done I dropped the pen on the floor and went to the closet and pulled down my duffel bag. He watched me pack. I folded things. I took my time. I took my grandmother's ring from the small dish on my side of the dresser and I put it in my coat pocket and I did not look at him once. "Is that it?" Ken said. "No big speech?" "You aren't worth the breath," I said. I zipped the bag and lifted it onto my shoulder and walked past him and down the stairs. I picked up my keys from the bowl by the door and I walked out. The rain was brutal. Cold and driving and the wind was already strong enough to push against me as I crossed the driveway. I got in the car and sat there with my hands on the wheel and the bag on the passenger seat and I let myself feel it. All of it. Then I started the car. I didn't have anywhere to go. I just drove. I turned onto the main road and pushed the accelerator and the rain came down harder and the wipers worked fast to keep up and I didn't slow down. I didn't care about the speed. I only cared about putting distance between myself and that house. The bridge came up faster than I expected. The road was slick and the wind across the open water hit the side of the car hard and I felt it shift. I corrected. I kept going. I saw the branch a second too late. It was massive. Half a tree across the lane. I hit the brakes and felt the tires give completely, no grip at all, and the car went wherever it wanted to go. I spun. The guardrail came at me sideways and I braced and then the impact hit and the sound of it was enormous and then the world flipped. Everything went dark. When I opened my eyes the car was on its roof. Rain was coming through the broken window and pooling on the ceiling around my head. My hip was screaming. I couldn't move my legs. I looked through the cracked windshield at the headlights pointing into the dark trees and I thought about the velvet box still sitting on Ken's bedroom floor. Then I opened my mouth and screamed for help.