Chapter 10
The word "Lawyer" stood in my notebook crookedly, as if I'd written it not with a pen but with a tremor.
I stared at it for the rest of the morning while Damien sat silently across from me, while my mother's missed calls flashed one after another on my phone, while Lara's message lay on the screen like a dirty fingerprint on glass.
"Don't think he became yours just because he threw me away.
" The most terrifying thing was not her venom.
The most terrifying thing was that somewhere inside me a woman still twitched who wanted to answer: he was mine before you.
That was how humiliatingly alive the love still was.
Even after the cameras. After the bracelet.
After his "no" to divorce. After my own mother's first instinct was to call "hysterical" not the daughter who'd been betrayed but the daughter who dared to strike the betrayer.
I closed the notebook.
"I'm meeting with the lawyer today."
Damien didn't raise his eyes right away.
He was too good at giving a pause its weight.
Before, I'd start filling pauses like those with justifications, softening, smoothing: "just to understand," "not necessarily divorce," "I need to know.
" Today I said nothing. Let him drown in what he couldn't control.
"Who?" he asked.
"A person who will represent my interests."
"A name."
"Why?"
"So I know who you're going to."
"No, Damien. This is exactly the place where you don't understand—you take note."
He leaned back in his chair. Calm. Too calm.
"If it's a family-law attorney, I want to make sure it's a competent professional, not a friend of a friend who'll feed you fairy tales about a graceful exit and half the empire."
"How sweet. You're already tending to the quality of my divorce."
"I'm tending to making sure no one exploits you in a state where you'll believe anyone who says 'you're right.'"
"Funny," I smiled, feeling my lips start to tremble again. "When Lara was saying 'you're pathetic,' you weren't so worried about me being exploited."
The blow landed. His eyes went a shade darker.
"I deserved that."
"Don't say it like you've paid a bill."
"I'm not paying. I'm acknowledging."
"Congratulations. Acknowledgment accepted by the chancery of hell."
He rubbed his face tiredly.
"Niki, I'm not forbidding you to meet with a lawyer."
"Thank you, Your Majesty."
"But I won't agree to a divorce."
"You said that yesterday."
"And I'll say it again today. Not because I enjoy sounding like a bastard.
Because in forty years I've learned to tell the difference between a decision and a hemorrhage.
You're hemorrhaging right now. I'm to blame.
But I won't stand beside you and sign a paper while you're cutting along the wound. "
"How convenient—being both the knife and the surgeon."
He exhaled sharply. Stood. Walked around the table. I stood too, so I wouldn't be sitting beneath him like a defendant.
"I'm going alone."
"Go."
"You won't send a driver after me."
"I won't."
"You won't check where I am."
He was silent a second longer than necessary.
"Damien."
"I'll try."
"No. You won't try. You'll do it."
"Fine. I'll do it."
"And you won't call this person after the meeting."
"If they don't try to swindle you, I won't."
I laughed.
"God. You even turn a promise into a clause with exceptions."
"Because the world comes with exceptions, Niki. Not everyone in it holds hands and honestly splits pain fifty-fifty."
"But some do honestly split the bed with their wife's sister."
He closed his eyes. For a second. Then opened them.
"Yes. Some do. Me."
I felt worse because he'd stopped dodging. Being angry at a wall is convenient. A wall doesn't bleed back.
The meeting with the lawyer that afternoon left me with a single sentence that lodged itself under my ribs: "He can choose not to want one.
That's not the same thing." I carried it with me through the rest of the day like a small, sharp stone—through picking up Marta from daycare, through listening to her explain that the bunny's passport was made from a sticker, through driving to Tim's practice where Damien stood at the entrance as promised, phone already put away before the children reached him.
"The old one died."
For a second something almost alive appeared between us. Not warmth. Not forgiveness. Just a strange understanding that we were both standing beside the same child who was trying not to look at his father, and neither of us knew how to return his sense of safety.
After practice, Tim came out damp, flushed, exhausted. Damien held out a water bottle.
"Good work."
"Coach says I rush."
"Coach is right."
"You promised not to boss him around."
"That's not bossing. That's respect for the coach."
Tim took the water.
"Mom, let's go?"
Damien didn't change expression, but I practically heard something fall inside him.
"I'll drive us," I said.
"I can follow," Damien said. "Marta ride with me?"
"Yes!" Marta yelled.
Tim looked at his sister, then at me.
"I'm with Mom."
"Okay," Damien said.
And again he didn't push. Damn him.
At home the children ate dinner quietly.
Almost. Marta chattered. Tim answered every other time.
Damien didn't try to fill the silence. I didn't try to rescue the evening.
After dinner, Marta dragged her father off to build a house for the bunny out of pillows, and he went.
Onto his knees. In expensive trousers, on the carpet, building an idiotic house for a stuffed bunny.
I watched from the kitchen and felt something inside me tear—not from anger but from the impossibility of simple hatred.
If he were bad at everything, leaving would be easier.
But he was a bad husband and a good father. That was the cruelest form of trap.
Tim came up to me.
"Mom."
"Yes?"
"Is Daddy trying?"
I looked at Damien, who was holding a pillow while Marta commanded: "Roof lower!"
"Looks like it."
"And you?"
"I'm trying not to fall apart."
Tim nodded.
"That counts too."
I crouched and hugged him. He allowed it. Not for long, but he allowed it.
Later, when the children were asleep, I came down to the kitchen for water. Damien was by the window. Waiting. Of course.
"Don't," I said at once.
"I won't argue about the lawyer."
"Then about what?"
"About you."
"Too late."
"I know you love that word, but it doesn't close every conversation."
"No, Damien. It doesn't close. It describes."
He came closer. I set the glass on the table.
"Don't touch me."
He stopped.
"I remember the boundary."
"Then stay there."
He nodded.
"I blocked Lara today. Everywhere. Phone, messaging apps, email, social media, access to the house and office. She's leaving. I didn't ask where."
The name struck my back.
"I don't care."
"You do."
I turned around.
"Are you really about to tell me what I feel?"
"No. I'm saying it can't be nothing to you this soon. And if you say 'I'm hurting,' I'll hear it. But if you say 'I don't care' every time, we'll both be talking to a stone wall."
"And who were you talking to when you slept with my sister? A living wife?"
He paled.
He stepped closer still. I pressed against the counter.
"Don't touch me."
He raised his hands slowly, so I could see. And still took my face in his palms. Not roughly. But firmly. So I couldn't hide, couldn't turn, couldn't pretend he was speaking to a wall.
"Let go."
"In a second."
"Damien."
"I'm an idiot," he whispered. Angrily, tightly, almost to his own face.
"I'm an idiot for doing this. I'm an idiot for thinking I could shut this filth behind a door and come back to you like nothing happened.
I'm an idiot for hitting you with words while I myself was the weakest person in this house.
But I'm not ready to let you go. Understand?
Not ready. Not because you're my property.
Because I think for the first time I've understood that I might come home and you won't be there.
And that thought leaves me unable to breathe. "
Tears rose instantly. I hated them. Hated myself that his fear could still reach me through the anger, like a hand through a crack in a door.
"Take your hands off me," I said.
He let go immediately.
I rubbed my cheeks as if they bore burns.
"You have no right to say that as if it changes something."
"I don't think it changes anything."
"Then why?"
"Because it's the truth."
"I needed the truth before Lara."
"I know."
"Don't say 'I know' when I say I hate you. It sounds like you've already forgiven me my reaction in advance."
"Then tell me the right response."
"There isn't one. Just be quiet. But not the silence you used to punish me with. Just be quiet and hear."
He went quiet.
I walked past him, not touching. And the air between us was harder than any door.
"I don't hate you every second," I said quietly.
"Sometimes I forget for a minute. When you hold Marta.
When you talk to Tim normally. When you stay silent where before you would have struck with a word.
And then I remember Lara and want to tear my own skin off, because you're still inside me.
That's the most disgusting part. Not that I hate you. That I can't just stop loving you."
He stood perfectly still.
"Niki..."
"Don't come closer."
He didn't.
"I don't know where you are inside me, Damien. And I don't know if I want to look."
I closed myself in the bedroom. Not with a key. Just the door. That mattered more. The key protected against him. The door without a key tested him.
An hour later, when the house had gone silent, I opened my email on my phone.
Ira had already sent the project documents.
Contract, timeline, first payment. I stared at the advance figure and could barely believe it.
A small sum. Laughable by Damien's standards.
Enormous for a woman who for the first time in years could say: this is mine.
Downstairs the study door clicked. Then footsteps. Damien stopped outside my bedroom. I saw the shadow beneath the door. My heart slammed against my ribs—once, twice, three times.
He didn't knock.
Didn't enter.
Simply set something on the floor on the other side and left.
I waited until his steps faded, opened the door, and saw a thin folder. Inside were copies of documents: the house, accounts, cars, insurance, children's trust funds. On top, a note in his handwriting: "You'll ask. I don't want you to have to beg."
I sank to my heels right there in the doorway.
The first thought was idiotic: he heard.
The second was scarier: so there's something to hide.