Chapter 4 #2
I didn't want this. I wanted a quiet divorce and a clean start and a life that had nothing to do with Silas Ryland's failures. Instead I got a public spectacle, and the spectacle is a weight I carry alongside the cracked ribs and the nightmares and the thin pink scar on my forearm.
Gail calls on a Tuesday.
"Papers served. He has not signed. His lawyers are using the thirty-day window."
"Of course they are."
"I have something else. Blackwell Associates made contact with my office. They've confirmed your location — Ho Chi Minh City, District 1, they have the address. They're reporting back to Silas."
I lean against the kitchen counter. The counter is small and cluttered with the instant noodle packets I buy in bulk from the market around the corner. My life in this apartment is small and cluttered and perfectly functional, and Silas now knows exactly where it is.
"Is he coming?"
"Not yet. His lawyers say he wants to respect your request for no contact. But, Lucy, the man hired a security firm to find you. Respect is not the word I'd use."
"What word would you use?"
"Control. He wants to know where you are so he feels like he has a plan. That's how men like him operate — they can't fix the thing, so they fix the information around the thing."
I think about this. Silas, in Los Angeles or wherever he is now, sitting with a report that says Lucy Ryland is in an apartment in Ho Chi Minh City, District 1.
She goes to an office on Nguyen Hue Boulevard.
She takes field trips to the Mekong Delta.
She eats noodles and doesn't own a table.
Here is her schedule. Here is her pattern.
Here is the shape of her day without you.
"Let him have the information," I say. "I'm not hiding."
"And if he shows up?"
"He won't. Not yet. He's not brave enough."
"That's a bet, not a strategy."
"Fine. If he shows up, he shows up. I'm not running. I'm working. There's nothing illegal about a husband visiting the city where his wife lives. And there's nothing he can do here except stand outside my building and realize I'm not coming down."
"I'll draft a formal communication boundary letter. It won't stop him from traveling, but it establishes on the record that you've requested no contact. If he violates it, we have documentation."
"Do it."
I hang up and realize I believe it. Not because Silas is a coward — he isn't, not exactly.
He's a man who has spent his entire adult life controlling outcomes, and right now he cannot control this one.
He doesn't know what to say to me. He doesn't know what gesture would work, what words would land, what version of himself to present.
So he's gathering intelligence instead. Mapping the territory.
Preparing for a campaign he hasn't figured out how to run.
The irony is thick enough to choke on. He's treating our marriage like a business problem — data first, strategy second, execution third. It's exactly the approach that killed the marriage in the first place.
Lottie calls that evening. I'm on the balcony, eating noodles — I bought a plastic chair from a sidewalk vendor, which counts as furniture — and watching the street below settle into its nighttime rhythm.
The fruit seller on the corner is packing up her cart.
A couple on a motorbike stops at the intersection, the woman riding side-saddle behind the man, her arm around his waist, her chin resting on his shoulder.
"He hasn't signed," Lottie says. No greeting. No preamble.
"I know."
"What's he waiting for?"
"He thinks if he waits long enough, I'll come back."
"Will you?"
The question lands harder than it should. Lottie asks it without sarcasm, without her usual sharp edge. She's asking because she doesn't know the answer, and she's afraid of the one I might give.
"No," I say. "I'm not going back."
"OK." A breath. "OK, good. Because Lucy, if you go back to that man after what he did —"
"I'm not going back."
"— I will personally fly to whatever country you're in and drag you out by your hair."
"Noted."
She's quiet for a moment. I can hear her pouring wine — the glug of a bottle, the clink of glass. Tuesday night in New York. Lottie in her Brooklyn apartment with its exposed brick and its view of the bridge, drinking red wine and worrying about me from five thousand miles away.
"Are you OK?" she asks. "Like actually OK, not Lucy OK, which means functioning-while-ignoring-everything-that-hurts?"
I look at the motorbike couple, now pulling away from the intersection. The woman lifts her chin from the man's shoulder and leans back, tilting her face to the sky. A casual gesture. An act of trust — leaning back on a motorbike, believing the driver will keep you safe.
"I'm getting there," I say.
"That's not yes."
"It's not no, either. It's honest. I think honest is the best I can do right now."
She accepts this. Lottie is good at accepting the versions of me I offer, even when she wants a different one.
She wanted me to leave Silas three years ago.
She wanted me to be angry, not resigned.
She wanted fire where I gave her ice. Now she wants me to be triumphant, and I'm giving her something she doesn't have a word for — a woman who did the right thing and feels heavy instead of free.
"Eat something real," she says. "Not noodles."
"The noodles are real. They come in a packet and everything."
"You're impossible."
"I love you too."
After we hang up, I sit on the balcony with the empty noodle bowl in my lap and think about the question Lottie didn't ask. Not will you go back — the other one. The one underneath it.
Do you miss him?
The answer is complicated in a way that makes me angry at myself.
I don't miss Silas. I don't miss the man who declined my call, who treated our marriage like an item on his to-do list, who spent five years making me smaller without ever raising his voice.
I don't miss the silences at dinner or the cancelled weekends or the way he'd look at his phone while I was talking, half his attention already somewhere else.
But I miss being married. I miss the idea of it — the architecture, the partnership, the somebody-is-there-ness.
Not somebody specific. Just somebody. Someone to eat dinner with.
Someone who knows how you take your coffee and which side of the bed you sleep on and what your face looks like when you're about to cry.
Silas was terrible at being that person. But for five years, he occupied the space where that person should have been, and the space is empty now, and the emptiness has a weight I didn't expect.
I wash the bowl. I brush my teeth. I get into bed and wait for the nightmare that may or may not come.
It comes.
Dark. Pressure. Concrete breathing. The phone lights up. Voicemail.
I wake at 2:15. I breathe. The motorbikes argue outside. I am alive and alone and both of those things are choices I made and I do not regret either one.
But I don't go back to sleep for a long time.