15. Hannah
— ? —
Hannah
Two Months
Two months since I walked out of the launch party. Two months since I left my ring on the kitchen counter. Two months since I stood on my parents’ porch and told Griffin I was pregnant and watched his face crumble when I said I still wanted a divorce.
Two months, and the papers are still unsigned.
Everything else about my new life runs on schedule.
The vitamins, the appointments, the slow reorganization of a future built for two into a future built for one and a half.
I’ve become terrifyingly good at logistics without an audience.
Turns out when you spend seven years running someone else’s life, running your own feels like a vacation with morning sickness.
I’ve moved back to the city now. Took a small apartment near the hospital where I’ll be delivering, nothing fancy, just a one-bedroom with decent light and a kitchen big enough to actually cook in.
It’s the first place I’ve ever lived that’s truly mine.
Not my parents’ house, not a dorm room, not a place I shared with Griffin. Just mine.
I should feel liberated. Instead, I mostly feel tired.
I’ve spent the two months learning the peculiar math of alone.
Cooking for one and eating leftovers for three days.
Assembling a crib with an Allen wrench and a YouTube video and nobody to hold the other side, crying twice, finishing anyway, and standing in the corner of the bedroom at midnight feeling like I’d built a monument to everything I wanted and everything I lost, both at once.
The apartment is close enough to Griffin’s building that I sometimes see his car on the street when I’m walking to the grocery store or the coffee shop on the corner.
Close enough that I’ve started taking alternate routes to avoid the possibility of running into him.
Close enough that the co-parenting arrangement we’ll eventually have won’t be a logistical nightmare.
Close enough that I can’t stop thinking about him.
Not that I’d ever admit that to anyone.
He’s been good about the boundaries. Better than I expected, honestly, and some contrary part of me resents him for it, which I recognize is insane.
I spent seven years wishing he’d give me space to breathe, and now he gives it flawlessly and I lie awake wondering why the quiet feels like another thing he’s taken.
He doesn’t call unless it’s about the baby.
He doesn’t show up unannounced. He sends polite texts asking about doctor’s appointments and whether I need anything, always phrased as questions, never demands, and I send polite texts back telling him the dates and times and no, I don’t need anything from him.
It’s civil. It’s mature. It’s exactly what I asked for, and my mother says I should be proud of how adult we’re being, and my OB says low stress is good for the baby, and everyone agrees this is the healthiest possible version of an unhealthy thing.
So why does it feel so wrong? Why do I read his polite little texts four times before answering? Why did I catch myself, last Tuesday, standing in the baby aisle of the grocery store holding a jar of the peanut butter only he eats?
Hormones. I’m blaming the hormones. The hormones and I have an understanding: they get to do whatever they want, and I get to blame them.
I push the thought away and focus on the task at hand. Which is standing outside his building, my hand pressed against the small bump of my stomach, visible now if you know what you’re looking for, easily hidden under loose shirts if you don’t, trying to work up the courage to go inside.
I shouldn’t be here. I should let the service handle this. I should let strangers deliver ultimatums on my behalf and keep myself safely insulated from the man who broke my heart.
But the papers have been sitting unsigned for eight weeks. Eight weeks of waiting, of checking my email obsessively, of wondering what the hell he thinks he’s accomplishing by dragging this out.
I need to see his face. I need to understand, and there’s a smaller, pettier need underneath that one, a need I’ll deny under oath: I need him to see me. The bump. The evidence. The future proceeding without his signature.
I take a deep breath, square my shoulders like I used to before board-the-plane goodbyes and bad-news meetings, and walk inside.
The doorman doesn’t know me. There’s no reason he would.
Griffin moved into this building six weeks ago, three weeks after I left, because he couldn’t sleep in our house anymore.
Blake let that slip during one of the logistics calls, then immediately regretted it, and I’ve been trying not to think about it ever since.
The house with the wide windows and the island and five years of our life in it, sitting empty, too haunted for either of us.
“I’m here to see Griffin Bloom,” I tell the doorman. “I’m his…” The sentence runs out of road. Wife, for eleven more signatures. Ex, for the rest of my life. “He’ll want to see me. Hannah.”
The doorman makes a call, murmurs into the receiver, and whatever he hears makes him look at me differently, carefully, like a package marked fragile. He waves me through.
The elevator ride takes forever. I watch the numbers climb and think about the fact that neither of us lives in our house anymore.
I ran four hours away and then circled back to a one-bedroom.
He lasted three weeks in five thousand square feet of us and then fled to a tower full of strangers.
All that marble, all those wide windows, all that proof of making it, and in the end neither of us could stand to sleep in it.
We made it. And then we lost it. The house gets to keep the view.
The elevator dings. I step into a hallway that smells like fresh paint and money, anonymous as a hotel, and his door is at the end, the only door on the floor, because of course it is. Even in exile, Griffin Bloom takes the whole top floor.
I knock.
Footsteps inside. The sound of a lock turning. And then the door opens, and there he is.
He looks terrible.
Not in the dramatic, sexy way that men in movies look terrible, artfully disheveled, tragically handsome, ready for their close-up.
Griffin looks actually terrible. Gaunt. Pale.
Dark circles under his eyes that suggest he hasn’t slept properly in weeks, maybe longer.
He’s wearing a faded t-shirt with a hole near the collar and sweatpants that have seen better days, and his hair is a mess, and he clearly hasn’t shaved since sometime last week.
“Hannah.” My name comes out of his mouth like he can’t believe I’m real. Like I might be a hallucination, or a dream, or some cruel trick of his exhausted mind. “What are you… is everything okay? Is the baby…”
“The baby’s fine.” I keep my voice flat. Businesslike. “I’m here about the papers.”
His face falls, hope draining out of it so fast I can almost hear it go. “Right. The papers.”
“You haven’t signed them.”
“I know.”
“It’s been two months, Griffin.”
“I know.”
“Then why?” I don’t mean for my voice to rise, but it does anyway.
Two months of frustration and confusion and hurt all bubbling up at once.
“Why are you dragging this out? What are you hoping to accomplish? Do you think if you wait long enough I’ll just forget?
That I’ll change my mind? That I’ll come crawling back because you refused to let me go? ”
He flinches at each question. Good. He should flinch.
“Can you come in?” he asks quietly. “Please? I don’t want to have this conversation in the hallway.”
I hesitate. Going into his apartment feels dangerous. Too intimate. Too close to the life we used to have together.
But I need answers. And I’m not going to get them standing out here where anyone could walk by and see us.
“Fine,” I say. “But I’m not staying long.”
The apartment is cleaner than I expected.
I half-thought I’d find it trashed, dirty dishes piled in the sink, empty bottles on every surface, the detritus of a man falling apart.
But it’s neat, organized, the kitchen spotless, and the only signs of life are a stack of papers on the coffee table that looks like it’s been shuffled through a hundred times, and a bookshelf by the window that stops me mid-step.
Pregnancy books. A dozen of them, maybe more, spines cracked, pages flagged with sticky notes. Books on infant sleep, on birth partners, on fatherhood. One of them is bristling with so many tabs it’s practically a paper hedgehog.
He sees me looking. He doesn’t say anything, and neither do I, but my chest does a complicated thing I have to breathe through before I can remember why I came.
“Do you want something to drink?” he asks, hovering awkwardly near the kitchen. “Water? Tea? I think I have some of that ginger stuff you like, for the nausea…”
“I want you to sign the papers.”
He flinches again. “Hannah…”
“No.” I turn to face him, crossing my arms over my chest, over my bump. “Don’t ‘Hannah’ me. You’ve had two months. Two months to process, to accept, to move on. And you’re still holding onto something that doesn’t exist anymore.”
“I’m not holding onto…”
“You’re still being selfish, Griffin.”
The words land like a slap. He actually takes a step back, like I’ve physically hit him.
“You say you love me,” I continue, my voice steady even though my heart is racing.
“You say you want to fix things, that you’ll do whatever it takes, that you’ve changed.
But you won’t even give me the one thing I’m asking for.
You’re still putting what you want above what I need. Just like you always have.”
He goes quiet, and the quiet stretches. I watch the emotions play across his face, hurt, shame, resignation, some internal battle I can’t see.
Then he walks to the kitchen counter and picks up a pen.
“You’re right,” he says. His voice is rough, broken, and he doesn’t dress the wound in a single excuse, doesn’t mention Julie or the speech or hope or history. “You’re right about everything.”
He pulls the papers out of a drawer, right there, easily accessible, like he’s been looking at them every day, torturing himself with them, and spreads them on the counter.
“I’ve been telling myself I was holding onto hope.” His hand is shaking as he positions the pen over the signature line. “That if I just waited long enough, you’d change your mind. That you’d see how sorry I am, how much I’ve changed, and you’d give me another chance.”
“Griffin…”
“But that’s not hope. That’s selfishness.” He looks up at me, and his eyes are wet. “That’s me, once again, making everything about what I want instead of what you need. That’s me, proving your point.”
He signs.
One name. One line. One moment that ends five years of marriage.
The pen scratches against the paper, and I watch his familiar signature appear, the same scrawl I’ve seen on thousands of documents over the years, on birthday cards and love notes and the mortgage for our house. But this one is different. This one means something else entirely.
When he looks up at me, there are tears streaming down his face. He doesn’t bother wiping them away.
“There,” he says. “It’s done.”
I stare at the signature. My throat feels tight.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
He nods. Swallows hard. Takes a shaky breath.
“I know I don’t have the right to ask for anything.
” His voice is barely audible, and he grips the edge of the counter like a man at a railing in high wind, and I realize he rehearsed this.
However this went, whatever I came here to say, he had this one request ready, the single card he’s been holding for two months, and he’s playing it with his hands shaking.
“But the baby… the appointments, the birth… I want to be there. I know I don’t deserve it.
I know I’ve done nothing to earn it. But I’m begging you, Hannah. Please. Let me be part of this.”
I should say no. I should protect myself, protect my heart, keep him at arm’s length where he can’t hurt me anymore.
But looking at him now, broken open, finally putting my needs ahead of his own, asking instead of demanding, I find I can’t.
“The next appointment is in two weeks,” I say, and I watch the words hit him like oxygen hitting a drowning man. “I’ll send you the details.”
Relief floods his face. His whole body sags with it. “Thank you. Hannah, thank you so much…”
“This doesn’t change anything.” My voice is sharp, cutting off whatever he was about to say, cutting off the hope I can see inflating in him like a life raft I refuse to be responsible for. “We’re co-parents. That’s it. Don’t mistake my cooperation for forgiveness.”
“I won’t.”
“Good.”
I pick up the signed papers and fold them carefully, tucking them into my purse. Evidence of an ending. Proof that it’s really, finally over.
I head toward the door, then pause with my hand on the knob.
“Griffin.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t be late to the appointment. And Griffin?” I make myself say the next part to the door instead of his face. “The books. The tabs. I saw.” I don’t tell him what it did to me. Some things he doesn’t get to have yet. “Just… keep reading.”
“I won’t.” His voice is barely a whisper. “I promise.”
I leave without looking back.
In the elevator, I let myself lean against the wall and close my eyes. My hand finds my stomach, pressing against the curve where our baby is growing.
“It’s going to be okay,” I murmur to the bump. “Whatever happens next, it’s going to be okay.”
The elevator doors open. I step out into the lobby, past the doorman with his careful expression, out onto a street where the late afternoon sun is warm on my face and a whole city of strangers is living ordinary lives around a woman carrying the end of her marriage in her purse.
The papers are in my purse. Signed. Final. Eight weeks of waiting for one scrawl of ink, and now I have it, and the whole way home I keep waiting for the lightness to arrive, the click of a chapter closing, the exhale.
It doesn’t come. What comes instead is the picture of him at that counter with his hand shaking, signing away the thing he wanted most because I told him wanting it was selfish. What comes is a dozen pregnancy books with their tabs sticking out like little flags of surrender.
I got exactly what I asked for.
So why don’t I feel relieved?