HIS FORSAKEN WIFE HIS GREATEST REGRET

He Breathed With Me

Roberta's POV

I lay in the guest room in the early morning and stared at the ceiling and replayed yesterday.

Not the pantry. Not Jace's hands on Millie in my kitchen. Not the sounds they made while my daughter was cold somewhere across the city.

The hallway.

Brett's hand on my wrist. The way he hadn't flinched when I raised my voice at him. The way he had pulled me in without asking and held me without making it into something and breathed with me until I could breathe on my own again.

Like he had assessed the situation, my pain and identified a gap, and decided to fill it.

I didn't know what to do with a man like that.

Eight years of marriage, and I have never seen this side of a man.

Brett's voice came from downstairs.

"Roberta!"

I sat up. My heart jumped. Not because something was wrong. Because his voice was warm and tender.

"Coming!"

I also heard another sound— the low sound of him talking to someone, professional and welcoming. I got up and dressed and ran my hands through my hair and went down.

He was in the living room with a man in a dark suit who was setting a briefcase on the table. Mid-forties. Sharp eyes. The kind of neat that comes from discipline rather than vanity.

Brett looked up when I came down the stairs.

Something moved through his face. Small. His eyes got softer. The corner of his mouth lifted. There. Gone.

"Morning." He said it like it was ordinary. Like we had been sharing mornings for years. "How did you sleep?"

"Better than I expected," I said.

He almost smiled.

He gestured to the sofa across from the suited man. "Come sit. There's someone I want you to meet."

I sat.

"This is Desmond Franklin." Brett sat beside me — not close, exactly right. "He's one of the best divorce attorneys in the country. I called him last night."

Desmond extended his hand. His grip was precise. "Good morning, Roberta. Mr. Temples briefed me on the situation last night. I've been reviewing what he shared." He opened his briefcase. "I have some thoughts."

I looked at Brett.

He was watching me. Waiting to see if it was too much, too fast, too—

He called him last night. He had called a lawyer. For me. While I was sleeping. While I was crying in his guest room.

He got it done. Just like that.

He's amazing.

I pushed the thought away.

I looked back at Desmond. "Yes," I said. "I want a divorce."

"Divorcing a man like Jace Riggs is manageable," Desmond said, with the calm of someone who had divorced men like Jace Riggs before and found them no more complicated than anyone else when the evidence was sufficient. "Significantly more manageable when the marriage was kept secret. Courts tend to view deliberate concealment of a marital relationship as relevant context." He set a document on the table. "The physical abuse documentation alone gives us strong grounds." He paused. "The situation regarding your daughter's surgery gives us the most."

"He didn't let me come," I said. "I don't even know which hospital. I have no records."

"That's actually useful." Desmond's pen moved. "The absence of records is itself evidence of deliberate exclusion. A mother who was not told, not present, not given any documentation of a major medical procedure performed on her child. That raises serious questions about consent, about coercion, about the nature of the agreement he made with the medical facility." He looked up. "Once your daughter's burial is arranged, we pursue this properly. Investigators, subpoenas, full disclosure." He set down his pen. "For now — I'm sending him divorce papers today."

He slid the document across the table toward me.

A pen beside it.

I looked at it.

It says Roberta Riggs, Petitioner.

My own name. My own marriage. Reduced to a document on a table in a man's house at nine in the morning.

I had never imagined this.

When I was standing with Jace in that registrar's office with Irene's disapproval radiating from the corner and Jace's hand warm in mine — I had not imagined this. I had imagined growing old in the same rooms. I had imagined Ziva with siblings. I had imagined arguments and reconciliations and the ordinary accumulation of a shared life.

I had imagined being loved.

I thought about the early years. Before, I finally understood what the marriage actually was. There had been moments — I couldn't pretend there hadn't — moments where Jace had been the person I fell in love with. His hands on my face. The way he had threatened to refuse his own mother for me. The night we had stood in the rain outside his parent's house, begging Irene.

I thought about Irene's face that day. The way she said, "She's nobody. She has no family. No name. She's not worthy of you."

I thought about Jace standing screaming that he would marry me anyway. That he didn't care what she thought.

He loved me once. Or I thought he did.

I had believed him.

I had believed him completely.

The pen was in my hand.

I didn't remember picking it up.

I was looking at the signature line and thinking about the girl who had stood in that rain and believed him and wondering at what point she had stopped being naive and started being trapped and whether there was even a clear line between those two things.

The pen slipped from my fingers. Hit the table. Rolled.

Clink. The pen hit the floor.

The sound brought me back.

Brett was watching me. His eyes were soft. He bent down, and picked up the pen.

He held it out to me.

I blinked.

I reached for it.

Our fingers touched.

The world stopped.

His skin was warm. Mine was cold. The pen was between us—small and silver and completely forgotten.

I looked up at his face. Then I looked down at our fingers on the barrel of the pen — his hand and mine, a half-second of contact, warm and entirely unexpected in its effect. I felt it move through me in a way that was disproportionate to the gesture and deeply inconvenient given the circumstances.

At that moment, I thought about his arms in the hallway. His hand on the back of my head. The steadiness of him.

I thought about what it would feel like to be held like that when the person holding you was not doing it out of grief or kindness but because they simply wanted you.

I wanted to be there again.

I wanted to stay there forever.

I caught myself.

Brett cleared his throat.

I looked up.

His eyes were on me. That reading look.

"You don't have to do it today," he said quietly. "If you need more time to think about it, then take your time."

Take your time.

Jace never said that. Jace never gave me time. Jace took. And took. And took.

I looked at the paper. At my name, already printed on the line. At the words that would end my marriage.

Ziva is dead. Jace killed her. Millie helped.

I don't love him anymore. He made sure I got over him.

"I don't need more time." I thought about Ziva lying in a morgue. I thought about the pantry. I thought about Jace's voice saying, "She's gone," like I was furniture being cleared out. "I've had eight years."

I turned back to the document.

And I signed.