Chapter 2 #2
"I'll have an attorney contact you," she said from the doorway.
"Aria —"
"Don't follow me."
She closed the door behind her. Walked down the limestone steps. Got in the white Audi. Started the engine. Pulled away from the curb with both hands on the wheel at ten and two, the way her mother had taught her when she was sixteen, because muscle memory was the only thing holding her together.
She made it six blocks before her hands started shaking.
#
Della opened the door before Aria knocked. She must have been watching from the window, or maybe she'd been standing there since Aria left, which was the kind of thing Della would do — position herself at the door like a lighthouse, steady and obvious and impossible to miss.
Aria walked in. Della closed the door. And then, in the narrow hallway of Della's apartment in the Mission, with a bicycle hanging on the wall and a stack of vintage cookbooks on the floor and the sound of someone playing guitar in the apartment below, Aria fell apart.
It wasn't pretty. She didn't cry the way people cry in movies — one elegant tear, a graceful collapse.
She cried the way a body cries when it has been holding everything for twelve hours and finally finds a room where it doesn't have to.
Her knees gave. Della caught her. They ended up on the hallway floor with Aria's face pressed against Della's shoulder, and the sounds coming out of her were sounds she didn't recognize, animal and raw and too big for her chest.
Della didn't say anything. Didn't say it's okay or you'll be fine or he doesn't deserve you.
She just held on. Her hand moved in slow circles on Aria's back, and she smelled like coffee and the jasmine perfume she'd worn since college, and she was solid and warm and present in a way that made Aria cry harder, because this was what someone showing up for you without an angle felt like.
It lasted a long time. Long enough for the light in the hallway to shift. Long enough for the guitarist downstairs to finish one song and start another. When Aria finally pulled back, her face was swollen and her nose was running and Della's kimono was dark with tears.
"Sorry," Aria said. Her voice was wrecked.
"For what?"
"Your kimono."
"It's from a thrift store in Oakland. It's seen worse." Della pushed a curl of dark hair away from Aria's face. "Talk to me."
So she did. She told Della everything — the phone on the nightstand, the messages, the photos, the eight months of Thursdays that Lucian had tried to compress into three.
She told her about the T-shirt and the sweatpants and the tremor in his left hand.
She told her about the word divorce and how it had come out clean, how she'd expected it to hurt more than it did.
"It'll hurt more later," Della said.
"I know."
"But you said it."
"I said it."
They moved to the couch. Della made tea — not coffee, because Della understood that coffee was what you drank in the morning when your life was normal, and tea was what you drank in the morning when your life had detonated.
She brought two mugs and a box of tissues and a blanket, and she sat on the other end of the couch with her legs folded under her and waited.
"I need a lawyer," Aria said.
"I know someone. My cousin's friend went through something — not this, but messy. She said her attorney was a shark. Good shark. The kind that bites the right people."
"What's the name?"
Della pulled out her phone, scrolled, typed a message. "I'm texting my cousin now. She'll have the name in an hour."
Aria wrapped both hands around the mug. The tea was too hot to drink, but the heat felt good against her palms, a small sharp thing to focus on that wasn't the sound of Lucian's voice saying don't say that like the word divorce was a bullet he could dodge if he was fast enough.
"He tried to buy his way out of it," she said. "Not with money — not yet. But with performance. The right face, the right words. Tell me what to do. Like it was a negotiation."
"That's the only language he speaks."
"I know. That's the problem." She took a breath. "He said he loved me."
"Do you believe him?"
"I believe he thinks he does."
Della was quiet for a moment. Outside, someone honked.
The guitarist had stopped. The apartment smelled like Earl Grey and old books and the warmth of a space that belonged to someone who decorated by instinct — mismatched frames, bold colors, a Mexican blanket over the back of a chair.
It was the opposite of the mansion. There was not a single surface in this apartment that had been chosen by a decorator.
"You can stay here as long as you need," Della said.
"I know."
"I mean it. Months. However long."
"I'm not going to be here for months."
"Why not?"
Because she couldn't. Because staying in Della's apartment meant she was hiding, and she was not going to hide.
She didn't have a plan yet — not a real one, not the kind with steps and timelines — but she knew the shape of what she wanted.
Space. Quiet. Somewhere that didn't smell like his cologne or echo with five years of memories that were now contaminated.
"I'll figure it out," she said. "But thank you."
Della's phone buzzed. She glanced at it. "My cousin says the attorney's name is Rachel Medina. Family law, downtown. She says call the office and tell the receptionist Janine sent you."
Aria took the phone. Looked at the name. Rachel Medina. She typed it into her own phone and saved it. The act of saving a divorce attorney's number felt both enormous and absurdly small — just a name, just ten digits, but behind them a machine that would take her marriage apart piece by piece.
She would call tomorrow. Today she would sit on this couch and drink this tea and let Della be near her, and she would not answer her phone.
Her phone buzzed. She looked at the screen. Lucian.
She set it face-down on the cushion.
It buzzed again at noon. Again at one-fifteen.
Again at two-forty. Again at four. Each time she looked at the screen long enough to confirm the name and set it down again.
He didn't leave voicemails. He just called, and called, and called, the persistence of a man who believed that repetition was a form of effort.
By five o'clock she'd stopped flinching at the vibration.
By six, Della had ordered Thai food and opened a bottle of red wine and put on a movie that required no emotional investment — something with car chases and explosions and men who solved problems by punching them.
They ate on the couch. They didn't talk about Lucian.
Della told her about a ceramic class she was taking and a terrible date she'd been on the week before, and Aria listened and sometimes almost smiled, and the wine was cheap and perfect.
At eight-seventeen, her phone buzzed again. The sixth call.
Aria looked at the screen. Lucian's name. His photo — a candid she'd taken two years ago at a vineyard in Napa, his sleeves rolled up, laughing at something she'd said. He looked happy in that photo. He looked like someone she'd trusted.
She let it ring.
The screen went dark. She turned back to the movie. Della reached over and squeezed her hand once, quick and hard, and let go.
Outside, the Mission was loud with a Tuesday night — music from a bar down the street, laughter, someone calling a name she couldn't quite hear.
Inside, the apartment was warm and quiet and smelled like pad thai and red wine.
Aria pulled the blanket up to her chin. She was exhausted in a way that lived in her bones, a tiredness that sleep wouldn't fix, and she knew that tomorrow would be harder in some ways and easier in others, because tomorrow she would call Rachel Medina and the machine would start.
But that was tomorrow.
Tonight, she let the phone stay dark and the wine stay open and the movie play its loud, stupid, uncomplicated story to its loud, stupid, uncomplicated end.
And when Della fell asleep beside her with her head tipped back and her mouth slightly open, Aria stayed awake a little longer, watching the credits roll, breathing in and out, steady as the tide.
She was not okay. But she was here. She was not hiding. And she had a name.
Rachel Medina.
She said it once, under her breath, like a promise. Then she closed her eyes.