19. Clara
— ? —
Clara
“I need more time.”
The words came out before I could second-guess them, sitting in my car during lunch break because Ana’s office was across town and I couldn’t wait until after work to make this call.
“How much time?” Ana’s voice was careful, professional.
“I don’t know. A few more weeks. Maybe longer.”
Silence on the line. I could hear her thinking, hear the questions she wasn’t asking, the concerns she was weighing against her professional obligation to do what I wanted.
“Clara.” She said my name the way she always did when she was about to be honest instead of just legal. “Are you having second thoughts?”
I stared out the windshield at the parking garage wall. Gray concrete. Fluorescent lights. Nothing like the open sky over the ranch that I still dreamed about sometimes.
“I’m having thoughts,” I said finally. “That’s all I can say right now.”
“Can you tell me what’s changed?”
What had changed. Where did I even start?
“The annual shareholders’ meeting is next Tuesday,” I said.
“Same day as Katie’s recital. Eva’s father has been building a case to remove him since the day he fired her, and every person in that room is going to want a piece of him.
” I stopped. Started again. “And he’s not going.
He wasn’t even going to tell me. I only know because I’m still on the invitation list.”
“That’s significant.”
I pressed my palm against the cold glass. “I’ve spent months feeling invisible. Feeling like I would never matter as much as his work. And now he’s about to give up something that actually matters to him, quietly, without making sure I’d notice, and I don’t know what to do with that.”
“You don’t have to know yet,” Ana said gently. “That’s what the pause is for. Take the time you need. The paperwork isn’t going anywhere.” A beat. “What about the restraining order? Do you want me to keep it on file?”
I thought about the man who’d wedged himself into a tiny chair at parent day, his knees up near his chest and the denim pulled tight across his thighs, and how I’d spent the entire caterpillar story looking at the wrong thing.
Who’d asked for nothing when it was over.
Who’d told me, in a daycare parking lot, that he was skipping a board vote for a four-year-old’s dance recital.
“Shelve it,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll need it.”
I thanked her and hung up and sat in my car for another ten minutes, just breathing.
The letter was in my purse. It was always in my purse now. The creases in the paper were starting to wear thin. I pulled it out and looked at Quin’s handwriting again.
The rodeo. I left my phone in the dressing room on purpose. I wanted one day where you had all of me.
One day. He’d given me one day, once, and I hadn’t even known it was a gift.
But the recital wouldn’t be one day. If he actually did it, if he actually sat in that front row while his phone exploded with shareholders demanding to know where he was, it would be a choice made in real time, with real consequences, in front of real witnesses.
And he hadn’t made it to be seen. He’d made it before he knew I’d find out.
If he actually did it.
I thought about the woman I was before I left. The woman who made herself smaller and smaller, who stopped asking for things, who learned to need nothing because needing led to disappointment. I’d shrunk myself down until I was barely visible, and then I’d blamed Quin for not seeing me.
He should have seen me anyway. That part was still true.
But maybe I should have demanded to be seen instead of waiting quietly for someone to notice I was disappearing.
I wasn’t that woman anymore. These past weeks had burned her away, replaced her with someone fiercer, someone who took up space, someone who walked into her divorce lawyer’s office and made demands instead of requests.
I wouldn’t go back to being invisible. Not for anyone.
But maybe, just maybe, I didn’t have to.
Maybe Quin wasn’t the same man either.
Maybe we were both becoming someone new.
I put the letter back in my purse and pulled up my calendar on my phone. Katie’s recital was next Tuesday. The same day as the board meeting.
I stared at the date for a long minute.
Then I typed a note beside it: front row, two seats.