7. Hannah
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Hannah
“I don’t know!” Griffin’s voice is strained, frustrated. “God! Hannah is so pissed, I know she is. But I didn’t know what to do then! Julie is a Myer!”
“So what?” Blake sounds disgusted. “You should’ve defended your wife, Griffin. You’ve been married for years.”
“You’re right. I should’ve said something.”
I press myself harder against the wall, barely breathing. My heart is pounding so loud I’m sure they can hear it through the door. My hands are shaking. My whole body is shaking.
Through the crack in the door, I can see the edge of Griffin’s shoulder, the amber liquid in his glass catching the low light. Blake is somewhere out of view, but his voice carries clearly.
Silence. I hear someone shift, the clink of ice in a glass.
“It’s been years, huh?” Griffin’s tone changes, softer now. Almost nostalgic. “Time flies.”
“Tell me about it.” Blake laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “I still remember when you called me and told me you were suddenly engaged. I about fell off my chair.”
“Yeah…” Griffin exhales heavily. “Feels like a lifetime ago. Me and Hannah…”
“The couple of the century.” Blake’s voice is warm with old affection. “That’s what everyone called you. Still do, actually. Half the office tells me you two give them hope that love actually exists.”
Griffin laughs. It’s a hollow sound.
And then he says it.
“Honestly? I didn’t marry her because I loved her.”
My heart stops.
Everything stops.
The hallway tilts sideways and I have to grab the wall to keep from falling. My knees buckle and I barely catch myself, pressing my palm flat against the wallpaper to stay upright.
“The company was just starting to take off,” Griffin continues, and his voice sounds far away now, muffled by the roaring in my ears.
“Hannah had put so much effort and time into helping me. Everything, man. The late nights. The sacrifices. She gave up her whole life for this dream. She turned down a full scholarship to business school because I needed her. She maxed out her credit cards when we couldn’t make payroll.
She slept on the floor of that shitty first office with me for three weeks straight during the first launch. ”
He pauses. Takes a drink.
“I felt like I should propose. Like I owed her.”
I press my hand to my mouth to stop the sound that wants to escape. My other hand goes to my stomach instinctively, pressing against the place where our baby is growing.
I owed her.
Not I loved her, not I couldn’t imagine my life without her.
I owed her.
“So you married her out of guilt?” Blake sounds as horrified as I feel. “Griffin, what the fuck?”
“It’s not that simple.” Griffin sighs, and I hear him set down his glass.
“I cared about her. I still care about her. She’s…
she’s Hannah, you know? She’s smart and loyal and she works harder than anyone I’ve ever met.
She takes care of everything. The house, the company, my schedule, my mother.
She handles all of it without complaining. The marriage works.”
The marriage works.
Five years. Five years of my life, my love, my soul poured into this man. Into this relationship. Into building something I thought was real.
And all along, I was just a checkbox. An obligation. A good wife who takes care of everything.
I’m going to be sick again.
“Look,” Blake says, and I hear him shift in his chair, “whatever you felt when you proposed, that was years ago. Things change. People change. You love her now, right? Anyone can see it. How you look at her, how you talk about her when she’s not around…”
Griffin doesn’t answer immediately.
My heart hangs in the silence, and I count the seconds, one, two, three, four, five.
“I love what we’ve built,” he finally says. “I love our life. Hannah is… she’s the foundation. Everything stands on her. The company, the house, my whole fucking existence basically. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Another pause. This one stretches longer. I can hear Griffin breathing, can almost see him running his hand through his hair like he does when he’s uncomfortable.
“All I know is Hannah’s been there for everything,” he finally says. “She’s never let me down. Not once. And I can’t imagine doing any of this without her.”
He can’t imagine doing any of this without me. What he didn’t say was living without me, or breathing without me, and the difference is the whole marriage.
I’m infrastructure to him, a function, the machine that keeps his life running smoothly.
I was never the love of his life, just the employee who got promoted to wife because I made myself too valuable to let go.
A thing breaks inside me, quietly and completely. I feel it happen, a crack that runs straight through the center of who I thought I was, who I thought we were together.
I back away from the door, one step, then two. My heels make no sound on the thick carpet, thank God for small mercies, and I slip down the hallway, through a service exit, into the cold night air.
The terrace is empty. Everyone is inside, celebrating, applauding, completely unaware that my entire world just ended in a side room down the hall, over two glasses of scotch, in under five minutes.
I don’t go back to the ballroom. I can’t. I can’t stand there in that red dress and smile at people who think I’m the luckiest woman in the world while my entire marriage crumbles to ash inside my chest.
My hands are shaking so badly I can barely hold my phone. I text Griffin: Not feeling well. Going home early.
My phone starts ringing before I’ve even flagged down a valet. Griffin’s face fills the screen, a photo I took on our honeymoon, both of us laughing, his arm around me, the ocean behind us.
I decline the call.
He calls again. I decline again.
Finally, a text: What’s wrong? Are you okay? I’ll come with you
I type back: Stay. This is your night. I’ll be fine.
Then I turn off my phone.
The valet brings my car around. I hand him a twenty without counting, my hands too unsteady to deal with change. I get behind the wheel and just sit there for a minute, staring at nothing, trying to remember how to breathe.
The valet stand still has our arrival ticket clipped to the board, the one from six hours ago, when I walked into this building holding my husband’s arm and believing I knew who he was.
Six hours. That’s all it took to end six years.
I unclip the ticket and hold it for a second, this stupid little rectangle of cardstock from the before, and then I let it drop into the gutter with the cigarette butts and the confetti.
The parking garage is underground and too bright. The fluorescent lights hum overhead, that specific frequency that makes everything look sickly and wrong. My phone sits on the passenger seat, dark now, but I keep glancing at it. Waiting for it to light up with his face again.
I pull out of the garage and onto the street, past the banner with the company logo lit up over the entrance, past a cluster of guests laughing on the curb with their valet tickets, past a whole glittering world that has no idea it just ended.
The drive home should take twenty minutes this time of night. No traffic. Empty roads. Just me and the city lights and the silence that feels like it’s pressing in from all sides.
I stop at a green light.
I don’t mean to. I just… stop. The car idles at the intersection while the light stays green, and I sit there staring at nothing until it turns yellow, then red.
Someone honks behind me.
I don’t move.
The light cycles back to green. The honking gets louder, more aggressive.
Finally I press the gas and keep driving, but I have no idea where I am.
The streets all look the same. The buildings all look the same.
Everything looks the same as it did this morning, when I still believed my husband loved me.
I can’t turn on the radio. I try, once, and the first thing that comes on is a love song, soft and acoustic, about forever and always, and I have to slam my hand against the button to make it stop.
The silence is worse, though. In the silence, I can hear his voice on an endless loop.
I didn’t marry her because I loved her.
I felt like I owed her.
The marriage works.
By the time I pull into our driveway, I’ve been driving for forty-five minutes. I don’t remember most of it.
The house is dark. Empty. I let myself in and stand in the entryway, my keys still clutched in my hand, my purse sliding off my shoulder.
Our wedding photo hangs on the wall across from me, dead center, the first thing anyone sees walking into this house.
Griffin chose the spot himself. He said he wanted every person who ever came through our door to know exactly what mattered most to him.
I used to melt a little every time I remembered him saying that.
Now I stand in the dark doing the translation work: he wanted the audience. He always, always wanted the audience.
I’ve walked past it a thousand times without really seeing it.
But tonight I can’t look away. There we are, frozen in a silver frame, me in white, him in black, both of us laughing at whatever the photographer said.
My veil is blowing in the wind. His hand is on my waist. We look happy. We look in love.
We look like strangers.
I slide down the wall.
I don’t make it to the couch, don’t make it to the bedroom, don’t make it anywhere. I just sink to the floor right there in the entryway, my back against the wall, my red dress pooling around me like a bloodstain. The wedding photo watches from above as I fall apart.
I cry until I can’t breathe. Until my chest aches and my throat is raw and there’s nothing left inside me but emptiness. I cry so hard I think I might be sick again, might actually throw up right here on the marble floors we picked out together.
I cry for the girl who fell in love with her TA and thought she’d found her person, the girl who gave up everything, her plans, her dreams, her whole identity, to help him build his empire.
I grieve for the woman who worked herself to the bone for seven years, who sacrificed her twenties, who put off having children and seeing her friends and living her own life because the company always came first, and who told herself the whole time that it was a choice she was making instead of a choice being made for her.
And I cry hardest, longest, for the baby growing inside me, conceived in a marriage that was built on obligation and guilt instead of love, a baby whose father said out loud, tonight, in a room full of amber light and old friendship, that he never loved its mother.
Eventually, I drag myself to the guest room. I lock the door behind me and lie on the bed, still in my dress, still in my makeup, staring at the ceiling.
My mind won’t stop replaying everything. Not just tonight. Everything. Every moment of our relationship that I’m now seeing with new eyes.
I think about our first date, how he smiled at me across the table, charming and confident, how I felt like the luckiest girl in the world that he’d even noticed me.
Was he calculating even then? Measuring my usefulness, my devotion, my willingness to sacrifice everything for him?
Or did the calculation come later, so gradually that even he never noticed the moment love got replaced by arithmetic?
I remember the night before a make-or-break pitch, three years into the company.
He was panicking, convinced he was going to fail, and I stayed up until 4 a.m. rewriting his presentation, practicing with him, talking him off the ledge.
When he crushed it the next day, he took me out to dinner and told me he couldn’t have done it without me.
I thought that meant he loved me. Now I realize it just meant I was useful.
And the worst part, the part that keeps circling back no matter how many times I push it away, is that he knows exactly what I gave up. I heard him recite it to Blake like a ledger. He’s kept a full inventory of every sacrifice I ever made, itemized and accurate.
He just filed all of it under debt instead of love.
I think about last month, when I asked him again about starting a family. “After the Myer project,” he said, the same thing he’d been saying for two years. I believed him. I always believed him.
Was he ever planning to actually follow through? Or was he just saying what he needed to say to keep me compliant, keep me working, keep me from asking questions he didn’t want to answer?
I think about two weeks ago in the kitchen, after Rhonda’s dinner. The way he apologized with his body instead of his words. The way I let him, because I was tired and hurt and I wanted to believe that the physical meant the emotional, that his hands on my skin meant his heart was in it too.
It didn’t. It never did.
I don’t sleep. I don’t even try. Sleep belongs to people whose worlds are still standing, and mine went down at a party, in formalwear, to applause.
Dawn comes slowly, gray light creeping through the guest room curtains. My eyes are swollen. My body aches. My mind is finally, blessedly quiet.
Not because I’ve found peace. Because I’ve made a decision.
First, the test. I need to know what I’m carrying into whatever comes next.
Then the launch, because seven years of my work deserves to cross its own finish line, and because I refuse to let anyone say I fell apart.
And then, once I know everything there is to know, I will decide what the rest of my life looks like.
For the first time in years, the plan is mine. Nobody assigned it to me. Nobody needs it from me. It’s just mine.
I pick up my keys and slip out before Griffin wakes.
I need to confirm what I already know.
I need to see two lines on a stick and face the reality that my whole life is about to change, and not at all how I imagined.