13. Hannah
— ? —
Hannah
The porch boards creak under my feet, the same three notes they’ve played since I was a kid sneaking in past curfew, and the screen door bangs shut behind me with a sound like a starting gun.
For seven days I’ve watched him from above, through glass and curtain, small and contained and manageable.
At ground level he is none of those things.
At ground level he’s just Griffin, my Griffin, the size he’s always been in my life, which is to say enormous.
He looks like hell.
That’s my second thought as I watch him scramble out of his car and half-run across the yard.
Dark circles under his eyes, a week’s worth of stubble covering his jaw, his clothes wrinkled beyond repair.
He’s lost weight. I can see it in his face, the hollows under his cheekbones that weren’t there before.
Good, I think. He should look like hell. I’ve been living in hell for a week because of him, and mine doesn’t come with the option of driving away from it. Mine is coming with me everywhere I go for the rest of my life, growing fingernails.
“Hannah.” My name comes out of his mouth like a prayer. “Thank God. I was starting to think…”
“Stop.” I hold up my hand. “I’m going to talk. You’re going to listen. And then you’re going to leave.”
His mouth snaps shut. He nods, his eyes never leaving my face, and there’s a terrible hope in them, a drowning man’s hope, and I have to look at the porch rail for a second because I can’t deliver what I came to deliver while watching him hope like that.
I take a breath. I’ve been rehearsing this conversation in my head for seven days. I know exactly what I need to say. The words are all lined up, ready to go.
But now that I’m standing here, looking at him, everything I planned to say seems inadequate. How do you sum up eight years of love and betrayal in a few sentences? How do you explain to someone that they broke your heart in ways you’re still discovering?
Start with the facts, I tell myself. Not the hallway, not the hurt, not the eight years. Start with the one piece of information that belongs to him no matter what he did, the thing I’d want to know if our positions were reversed, the thing that makes this conversation a duty instead of a mercy.
“I’m pregnant.”
The words hang in the air between us. A bird lands on the porch rail and leaves again. Somewhere down the street a lawnmower starts up, the world going on with its ordinary Saturday while my husband’s entire universe rearranges itself in his face.
I watch them land on Griffin’s face. First shock, his eyes going wide, his mouth opening slightly.
Then confusion, like he’s trying to fit this new information into everything else he knows.
Then something that looks horribly, painfully like joy.
His whole face transforms, lighting up from the inside.
“Hannah.” His voice breaks. “That’s… oh my God, that’s…”
“I still want a divorce.”
The joy dies.
It’s like watching a candle get snuffed out. One second his face is alive with happiness, and the next it’s just… gone. Replaced by something hollow and devastated.
“What? No… Hannah, we’re going to have a baby. This is what we wanted. This is what you’ve been asking for…”
“What I wanted.” I cut him off. “Past tense.”
“I don’t understand. I don’t… Hannah, please, help me understand. I know the speech was bad. I know I should have thanked you instead of Julie. But this? A divorce? Over a speech?”
“You think this is about the speech?”
“Isn’t it?” He spreads his hands, and there’s something almost childlike in the gesture, a boy genuinely showing me his math.
“Hannah, I’ve gone over that night a hundred times sitting in that car.
The speech, the party, my mother’s dinner.
I know I’ve failed you a hundred ways. Just tell me which one was the last one. Tell me which one did it.”
I laugh, but there’s no humor in it. “The speech was just the last straw, Griffin. The final proof that I was never going to be a priority to you. But you’re right about one thing.
It isn’t the reason. You want the reason, you’ll have to go further back than the launch.
You’ll have to go all the way back to a rooftop. ”
“That’s not true…”
“Then let me explain.” I keep my voice steady, even though my hands are shaking, even though my heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat.
“The night of the pre-launch party. After Julie humiliated me in front of everyone. After you stood there like a coward and said nothing. I went to find you.”
His face goes pale.
“I heard you talking to Blake.”
Paler.
“I heard everything, Griffin.” I hold his gaze, refusing to look away. “I heard you say you didn’t marry me because you loved me. I heard you say you felt like you owed me. I heard you tell your best friend that our marriage was built on obligation and guilt, not love.”
“Hannah…”
“Was any of it real?” My voice cracks for the first time.
I hate that it cracks. I wanted to get through this without crying, without showing him how much he hurt me.
But I can’t. The pain is too big. “Any of it? The rooftop, the proposal, the promises… was any of it true, or was I just too convenient to let go?”
I think about year two, the both of us on the floor of that first office at four in the morning, splitting gas-station noodles, and him looking at me over the carton and saying, when this works, and it’s going to work, it’ll be because of you.
I believed him. I think about the honeymoon, that photo that still comes up when he calls me, the two of us laughing so hard at nothing that a stranger offered to take the picture just to be part of it. I believed all of it.
“Because I can’t tell anymore, Griffin. I can’t tell which memories were real and which ones were just me, believing hard enough for both of us.”
He opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again.
I wait. I stand on my parents’ porch with my arms crossed over the place where his child is growing, and I give him the chance, one full silent minute of it, to explain, to defend himself, to offer any reading of his own words that makes them mean anything other than what they plainly meant.
The lawnmower down the street cuts out. The whole block goes quiet, like the neighborhood itself is waiting with me.
He doesn’t take it. He stands there with tears on his face and eight years in his hands and nothing at all in his mouth, and that silence tells me more than the hallway did.
“The speech,” he finally says, his voice desperate. “Julie threatened the partnership. I never wanted…”
“I don’t care about Julie.” The words come out sharp, cutting. “Julie didn’t marry me. Julie didn’t promise me a family for two years while always finding a reason to put it off. Julie didn’t stand in front of me on a rooftop and tell me I was her whole future.”
“Hannah, I…”
“I gave you everything, Griffin.” The tears are coming now, and I don’t bother trying to stop them.
“Everything. My time, my career, my love, my body, my whole fucking life. I gave up a scholarship to business school because you needed me. I maxed out my credit cards to make payroll. I slept on the floor of that shitty office for three weeks because you couldn’t afford to hire anyone else. ”
“I know…”
“I built that company with you. I was there for every late night, every early morning, every crisis that needed handling. I managed your schedule and your mother and your entire life so you could focus on being the brilliant CEO. And I never asked for credit, never asked for recognition, never asked for anything except your love.”
“You have it…”
“And the whole time, you were just settling. Keeping me around because I was useful. Because I made your life easier. Because you felt like you owed me.”
“That’s not…”
“I never expected anything from you except your love. Everything I did, everything I gave, it was out of love. And you couldn’t even give me that much back.”
He’s crying now too. Actual tears streaming down his face, his shoulders shaking. Part of me, a small, stupid part, wants to go to him. Wants to comfort him. Wants to tell him it’s okay, that we can work through this, that I forgive him.
That part of me is the same part that got me into this mess in the first place, the part that has spent eight years translating his silence into love and his convenience into devotion.
I stand very still and let the urge pass through me like weather.
It takes a long time. He cries like he does everything, completely, beautifully, and I make myself watch without moving, because if I learn nothing else from this marriage, I am going to learn to stop being the one who crosses the distance.
“We can work out custody once the baby is born,” I say. My voice is steadier now. Colder. “The papers will find you, Griffin. All you have to do is sign.”
“I don’t want a divorce!” The words explode out of him. “Hannah, please… I know I fucked up. I know I’ve been a terrible husband. But I can change. I can be better. Just give me a chance…”
“I don’t care about what you want anymore, Griffin.”
The words land like a slap. He actually flinches, like I’ve hit him.
“For once in our marriage,” I continue, “this is about what I want. And what I want is to never see you again.”
I turn to go back inside.
“I’ll fight it.” His voice is desperate, grasping. “I won’t sign. I’ll contest everything. I’ll…”
I spin back around to face him.
“And prove my point? That you only care about what you want? That you’ll hold me hostage in a marriage I don’t want just because you’re not ready to let go?”
He freezes.
“Think about it, Griffin. Really think about it. Is that love? Is that what you want our child to see? A father who refused to let their mother go, even when she begged him?”
He doesn’t have an answer.
“Goodbye, Griffin.”
I walk back inside. I close the door. I lean against it and listen to the sounds on the other side, his footsteps on the porch, hesitating, then moving away.
His car door opening and closing. And then nothing.
No engine. A full minute of nothing, then another, and I stand there with my back against the door picturing him sitting behind the wheel with his keys in his hand, trying to make himself turn them.
When the engine finally starts, it idles for a long stretch before I hear the tires move. I count the seconds like I counted them outside Blake’s door, and I don’t let myself open the door to watch him go.
And then, finally, silence.
I slide down the door and sit on the floor, my back against the wood, my knees pulled up to my chest. My hand finds my stomach, pressing against the place where our baby is growing.
My mother finds me there a few minutes later.
She doesn’t say anything at first. She just sits down beside me on the floor, her back against the wall, and takes my hand in hers.
“He’s gone?” she asks.
“For now.”
“How do you feel?” she asks, and it’s such a mother question, so gentle and enormous at once, that it takes me a while to even find the edges of an answer.
I think about it. How do I feel? Relieved? Devastated? Angry? All of the above?
“Empty,” I finally say. “I feel empty.”
“That’s normal.”
“Is it? Because it doesn’t feel normal. It feels like somebody unscrewed the middle of me and carried it off, and everyone keeps expecting me to stand up straight anyway.”
“You just ended a marriage, sweetheart. You’re allowed to feel empty. You’re allowed to feel whatever you feel.”
I rest my head on her shoulder. We sit there together in silence, mother and daughter on the hallway floor like two women who missed the last chairs at a party, while the afternoon sun slants through the windows and the house settles around us with its familiar old-wood sounds, the same creaks and ticks that carried me through every heartbreak I had before I met him.
None of those were heartbreaks, it turns out.
This is a heartbreak. Those were rehearsals.
“Did I do the right thing?” I ask. “Telling him like that?”
“I think you did what you needed to do.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” she agrees. “But it’s the truth. There’s no right way to end a marriage. There’s just… ways. And you chose yours.”
“He looked so broken.”
“He should. He broke you first.”
“Mom.”
“I’m not going to pretend, Hannah. You spent a week defending him to yourself out loud in my kitchen.
Somebody in this house should get to be just plain angry, and I’m volunteering.
” She squeezes my hand. “But for what it’s worth, watching you out there?
You weren’t broken. You were the only person on that porch standing up straight. ”
I close my eyes and let the tears fall. My mom holds me while I cry, rubbing circles on my back like she did when I was a child, murmuring soft words I can’t quite make out.
“It’s going to be okay,” she says finally. “I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, but it’s going to be okay. You’re strong, Hannah. Stronger than you know. And whatever happens next, you’re not going to face it alone.”
I want to believe her.
I’m not sure I can.
But I let her hold me anyway, and I let myself cry, and I try to imagine a future that doesn’t include the man I thought I was going to spend my life with.
It’s hard. It’s so hard.
But it’s the only option I have left, so I sit on the floor of my parents’ house with my mother’s arms around me and my father’s footsteps creaking somewhere overhead, and I start, breath by breath, to practice a life I never planned.
Outside, the street stays empty. For the first night in a week, nobody is parked at the curb, and I fall asleep telling myself the hollow feeling in my chest is relief.
It isn’t. But it will be. I’m going to make sure of it.