“If Philadelphia wins tonight, we get divorced.” Marcus said it without looking at me, his eyes fixed on the television as if he had suggested ordering another pizza instead of ending our five-year marriage.
Chapter 2
Marcus did not come home for three days.
Hailey documented nearly every hour.
Flowers on the kitchen counter. Breakfast in bed. Marcus carrying grocery bags. Marcus fastening a necklace around her throat. Marcus kneeling beside her chair with his hand resting possessively against her stomach.
My best friend, Amy, called me after seeing the photographs.
“I’m going to say something I’ll regret,” she warned.
“Then don’t.”
“She’s humiliating you on purpose.”
“I know.”
“And Marcus is letting her.”
“I know that too.”
Amy went quiet.
“Claire, how can you sound so calm?”
I looked around the house Marcus and I had built together. I had chosen the walnut dining table, the linen curtains, the green ceramic lamp beside the sofa. Five years earlier, every room had seemed like proof that we were building something permanent.
Now it looked like a museum dedicated to a marriage that had died before either of us bothered to bury it.
“I think I’m tired,” I said.
Marcus had not always been cruel.
That was what made leaving harder than hating him would have been.
He remembered birthdays and anniversaries. He knew I hated lilies and loved peonies. If I was sick, he used to stay awake all night checking my temperature. Once, after I casually mentioned wanting to see the Oregon coast, he canceled a business conference and drove me there himself.
There had been love between us.
Real love.
But love, I was beginning to understand, could be real and still become ruined beyond repair.
The divorce papers arrived on the fourth day.
That evening, I called Marcus.
Hailey answered his phone on video.
“Claire!” she said brightly. “Marcus is cooking for me. Pregnancy nutrition, you know.”
Behind her, Marcus stood at a stove wearing an apron.
Once, he had cooked almost every dinner I ate because he worried I worked through meals.
After Hailey entered our lives, he stopped noticing whether I ate at all.
“Tell him I need him home tonight,” I said.
Hailey smiled.
“Of course.”
Marcus arrived shortly before midnight.
He froze when he saw me sitting in the living room.
“You’re still awake?”
“I was waiting.”
I placed the papers on the table.
“I signed.”
He stared at them.
“Our assets have been calculated,” I continued. “Because of the affair and the marital money spent on Hailey, my attorney recommends that I receive seventy percent of our liquid assets.”
His face hardened. “Seventy?”
“Yes.”
“That’s excessive.”
“You funded a three-year relationship with our money.”
He looked away.
For a moment, neither of us moved.
Then Marcus picked up the pen and signed.
I took my copy.
“Tomorrow morning,” I said. “We file.”
He frowned. “Are you really in that much of a hurry?”
“The sooner we file, the sooner Hailey’s baby can be born after you’re legally free.”
His expression changed.
“You know?”
“I saw her announcement.”
“She only told me about the pregnancy yesterday,” he said quickly. “Claire, I swear I didn’t know before that.”
I stood.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Halfway across the room, nausea surged so violently that I barely reached the downstairs bathroom.
Marcus followed.
He knelt beside me while I was sick, rubbing my back the way he used to years ago.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re obviously not fine.”
When I stood, he reached for me.
“Maybe we should delay the divorce. If you’re sick—”
“No.”
I stepped around him.
“There’s nothing left to delay.”
Upstairs, I removed the pregnancy report from my purse.
The child had been conceived on a night two months earlier when Marcus came home drunk after fighting with Hailey. He had climbed into my bed, held me as if nothing had changed, and whispered another woman’s name while half asleep.
I folded the report.
Then I crumpled it and dropped it into the wastebasket.
The next morning, we filed for divorce.
Outside the courthouse, Marcus offered to drive me home.
Before I could answer, Hailey called.
Her voice carried clearly from his phone.
“How did it go?”
“There’s a thirty-day waiting period.”
“Okay. Are you coming over? The baby and I miss you.”
Marcus looked at me.
He hesitated for perhaps three seconds.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll come.”
I opened the door of the rideshare that had just pulled up.
“Claire—”
“Go.”
That afternoon, Hailey posted that people should stop judging relationships they did not understand.
Sometimes, she wrote, a marriage is already dead. Sometimes the person who is no longer loved is the one standing in the way.
Amy argued with her publicly until Hailey blocked her.
Then Marcus posted a comment.
My marriage was already broken. We are divorcing. Hailey did not destroy anything.
I read his words several times.
Then I remembered our engagement party.
Marcus had held up his hand and sworn in front of everyone that if he ever broke my heart, God could strike him down where he stood.
I had laughed and kissed him.
At twenty-nine, I believed promises mattered because the people making them understood what they meant.
At thirty-seven, I knew better.
I liked Marcus’s comment.
Then I packed my bags.
He came home while I was closing the third suitcase.
“You’re leaving now?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t need to do this dramatically.”
I looked at him.
“Dramatically?”
“You agreed to the divorce too.”
“Your girlfriend is pregnant. I’m making room.”
“I never said Hailey was moving here.”
I lifted the suitcase onto the bed.
Marcus remained in the doorway.
Then he said something that finally explained what years of lies never had.
“Don’t you get tired, Claire?”
I turned.
“We’ve been doing the same thing for years. Same dinners. Same weekends. Same conversations. Your whole life revolves around me.”
His voice softened, almost apologetically.
“With Hailey, I feel alive again. I feel like I’m dating someone. There’s excitement.”
I studied him.
All those years I had rearranged my career around his schedule, kept his home, remembered his parents’ birthdays, hosted his business dinners, and waited up when he worked late.
He had experienced my devotion as boredom.
I smiled.
“You’re right.”
Marcus blinked.
“What?”
“It is exhausting.”
The next morning, movers carried out my belongings.
Before I left, Marcus stood near the door.
“If you ever need anything,” he said, “you can still call me.”
I walked past him without answering.
That night Hailey moved into my house.
She sent me a message personally.
Marcus thinks it’s safer for me and the baby to stay here. We wouldn’t want anything happening to this pregnancy like what happened to yours.
For several seconds I couldn’t breathe.
Three years earlier, I had gone to Marcus’s office to surprise him with the news that I was pregnant.
Instead, I found him kissing Hailey.
I backed away in shock, stumbled on the stairs outside his office, and miscarried later that evening.
Marcus had spent two weeks beside my bed afterward.
Neither of us ever spoke Hailey’s name.
Now she had turned the worst night of my life into a weapon.
I typed one sentence.
Are you proud of what you did?
Marcus called five minutes later.
“She’s immature,” he said. “Don’t take everything she says seriously.”
I laughed quietly.
“You don’t need to explain your girlfriend to me.”
“She’s pregnant and alone.”
“Then take care of her.”
“Claire—”
“We’re getting divorced, Marcus.”
I ended the call.
Then I placed both hands over my abdomen.
The following morning, I made an appointment.
Thirty days later, our divorce became final.
Marcus called my name outside the courthouse.
I kept walking.
I had already ended the pregnancy.
I had already booked a flight to Portland.
And I had already decided that the woman Marcus had spent years taking for granted was never coming back.
