Chapter 42
LAUREL
“The court finds the agreement fair and approves the final decree.” The judge says it in the same brisk voice she used to confirm our signatures, the property division and the fact neither of us intends to drag the other into another hearing, and I almost want to laugh.
Eleven years of marriage, fourteen years of Grant woven into my life, and apparently ending it requires fewer questions than we asked the poor salesman when we bought our refrigerator.
Early October light spills pale across the courthouse windows, Nashville finally losing the worst of its summer heat, and I sit beside Evelyn with my hands folded over a folder that has spent months getting fatter as my marriage got smaller.
Grant sits across the aisle with Charles.
Charcoal suit, white shirt, no tie. I’ve seen the suit a hundred times, but I’ve never seen it hang off him like this.
He’s lost weight. A lot of it. His face looks sharper, exhaustion carved into places I used to know better than my own, and today he manages not to look at me every damn time someone says Bellamy.
The waiting period is long gone. Mediation is signed.
The Nashville house is headed for sale. His Russell debt stays his, our investments have been untangled, neither of us gets spousal support, my twenty-one percent of Mercer stays mine, his thirty-nine point eight stays his, and the catalogue Grant spent years treating like an extension of our marriage has finally been forced to learn where I end and he begins.
Mercer still has its corporate shit show to finish, the special committee can spend the next century fighting with his lawyers if it wants, Sloane has her own mess and the lenders can keep sending documents thick enough to stun livestock.
None of it needs me anymore. The marriage has officially run out of business.
The judge signs her name. The clerk stamps the decree with one hard little thump, and that’s fucking it.
Evelyn touches the edge of my folder. “We’re done.”
I look at her like she has clearly skipped a page. Done?
There should be more ceremony to this. A bell. A siren. Somebody should dim the lights. Eleven years shouldn’t die under fluorescent bulbs with a clerk already reaching for the next case.
My chest hurts anyway, only not in the spectacular way I once imagined divorce would hurt. It hurts quieter.
Memory starts rifling through me without permission: Daddy fastening my bracelet on our wedding day since Mama’s hands were shaking; Grant waiting at the end of the aisle looking so fucking terrified I laughed before I even reached him; cheap white roses after we decided feeding everyone mattered more than flowers; vows scribbled on hotel stationery after he left the proper card at home.
Our kitchen table covered in paperwork the night we created Mercer Records.
Champagne we absolutely couldn’t afford before.
My surgery. Daddy’s funeral. Caroline’s loss.
The lake house. Christmas mornings. Screaming matches.
Sex. Inside jokes so stupid they would require footnotes for anyone else.
Grant making coffee in the kitchen on mornings so ordinary neither of us knew to memorize them.
And the ugly shit gets its turn too. Camille. Sloane. Daniel. Offers buried before they could reach me. Magnolia Rain. Four unanswered calls on our anniversary while my husband was fucking another woman.
For so long I kept trying to sort our marriage into piles—what was real, what was ruined, what I was allowed to miss without betraying myself.
Sitting here, I finally understand how pointless that is.
It was all real. The good doesn’t acquit the bad.
The bad doesn’t travel backward in time and erase every morning I was happy.
It all belonged to the same marriage, and I don’t have to keep putting it on trial now that the actual court is finished with us.
“Mrs. Mercer?” the clerk calls, then glances at the decree and catches herself. “Ms. Bellamy. Your counsel can collect the certified copies outside.”
Such a tiny correction. Barely a stumble. She’s already reaching for another file, completely unaware that she has just handed me something I haven’t possessed in eleven years. Ms. Bellamy. My own fucking name, cleanly mine again.
I stand, and across the aisle Grant rises at almost the same moment. This time he does look at me. Really looks.
The courthouse falls away for one stupid second and I can see us at twenty-one and twenty-four, still broke, still ridiculous, still standing at the beginning of everything with no clue what we are capable of doing to each other.
His face changes, and mine probably does too. I loved that man.
Evelyn gathers her files. Charles leans close to say something Grant barely seems to hear.
Someone opens the courtroom door, the spell breaks, and I turn away first—not to punish him, not to win, not even because it hurts.
I turn because my life is on the other side of that door now.
The moment passes, the way moments always do once you stop mistaking them for promises.
∞∞∞
Mama, Dean, Monica and Nora are waiting outside even though I explicitly told everyone not to turn my divorce into a field trip.
Naturally, they interpret that as a scheduling suggestion.
Mama is in navy with sunglasses large enough to conceal both her eyes and a misdemeanor.
Dean is wearing a button-down only because Monica vetoed the T-shirt he wanted, THE AUDACITY stamped across the chest in block letters, which would’ve been funny for ten seconds before Evelyn strangled him with his own collar.
Nora has coffee for the group and a bakery box tucked under one arm that she refuses to explain.
Caroline sends flowers to my townhouse instead of coming; today is already complicated without Grant’s sister standing beside my family while photographers turn basic human affection into a declaration of war.
Celia sends one text before the hearing—Whatever you feel afterward is allowed.
Nothing is required.—and mercifully leaves it at that.
Beckett sends nothing. That one is deliberate.
Yesterday I told him I didn’t want him here, didn’t want a good-morning text landing on my phone five minutes before a judge legally dismantled the life I built with another man.
“I need the ending to have its own room,” I told him.
He said he understood, and because he actually really does, he hasn’t touched the boundary since.
Nora takes one look at my face when I come through the courthouse doors and evidently decides a joke has better odds than sympathy.
“Before anyone starts crying, I need it entered into the record that the bakery refused to write CONGRATULATIONS ON LOSING TWO HUNDRED POUNDS OF MAN. Something about professional standards.”
Mama turns toward her at glacial speed. “What did they write?”
Nora lifts the lid just far enough to reveal HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY iced across a vanilla cake with a tiny sugar gavel sitting on top.
Dean peers over her shoulder. “Cowards. Mine was better.”
“Your entire personality could be submitted as evidence for that bakery’s decision,” Monica tells him.
I laugh. An actual laugh, sharp and startled, and that’s what does me in. One second I’m looking at a ridiculous sugar gavel; the next my face is wet and I’m pissed about it.
I turn away on instinct, but Mama catches my chin. “Don’t you dare be embarrassed.” Her voice goes soft, which is frankly dirty pool. “You’re allowed to mourn a marriage you chose to end.”
My throat closes around whatever smart-ass answer I might’ve managed. My voice has more freedom now than it has in years, but apparently grief doesn’t give a shit about medical progress.
“I thought I’d feel free.”
Monica steps closer. “Maybe tomorrow. Maybe today sucks. There isn’t a correct order for this.”
Dean slides an arm around my shoulders. “For the record, I’m judging Grant’s sequence.”
“Dean,” Monica warns.
“Fine. Internally.”
Nora shoves coffee into my hand like caffeine is an approved grief intervention, and I take it.
Past the courthouse barricade, cameras are already waiting. Grant’s confession after mediation turned our divorce from celebrity gossip into some grand public morality lesson strangers can debate between weather updates and dog walks.
Someone shouts my name. Another asks if I’m officially divorced now.
A third wants to know whether I have a statement.
At least no one asks if I still love him.
Thank fuck for small mercies; I’ve got zero interest in watching the most complicated truth of my life get carved into twelve words under a photograph.
We start toward the cars, our little pack closing around me without discussing it, when Charles comes out behind us and calls, “Laurel.”
Every member of my family turns at once with the synchronized hostility of people who have definitely discussed where to hide a body.
Charles actually pauses. Grant stands several feet behind him holding a cardboard file box, looking like the courthouse has taken a few more pounds off him in the last twenty minutes. He doesn’t come closer until I nod.
Mama adjusts her handbag. “We’ll be at the car.”
The tone suggests the car is approximately fifteen feet away and she remains available for felony work. Nora hooks an arm through Dean’s before he can say anything stupid, Monica herds the rest of them along, and Grant stops in front of me with the cameras popping beyond the barricade.
His attention flicks toward them once, then returns to me. “Can we have five minutes?”
My first instinct is no. Clean, immediate, deserved. Then years rise up behind the question—not as an argument, just a fact—and I decide five minutes isn’t surrender.
∞∞∞
We walk around the side of the courthouse, past a narrow strip of landscaping into the employee lot where we have a decent shot at five private minutes unless a photographer decides today is the day to scale a hydrangea.