Chapter 6
The process server finds me at the shop on a morning when I’ve got dirt under my fingernails and a bucket of dahlias I’m trying to condition before they wilt.
She’s polite about it. Asks if I’m Rachel George, hands me the envelope, and tells me to have a good day on her way out.
Then she’s gone, and I’m standing at my worktable holding a legal envelope that weighs more than it should.
I don’t open it right away. I set it on the counter and go back to the dahlias, because they won’t last if I don’t get them into water, and that feels more urgent than whatever Drew’s lawyer put on paper.
I strip the stems. I fill the bucket. I get the dahlias settled.
Then I wash my hands, dry them on my jeans, and open the envelope.
It’s about what I expected. Division of assets, the house, the accounts.
His lawyer’s asking for a clean split, which sounds reasonable until I think about what “clean” means when one person spent ten years managing a household and the other spent it building a business with the freedom that management gave him.
Clean isn’t the same as fair. My lawyer will have thoughts about that, I’m sure.
I call her from the back of the shop. Patricia Engel, the attorney Donna’s sister used for her divorce and recommended with the exact words, “She doesn’t play nice, and you don’t want nice right now.” Patricia picks up, I tell her what I’m looking at, and she tells me not to sign a thing.
“They always start with the split that benefits them and call it reasonable,” she says. “Let me see the paperwork. We’ll talk about what you’re actually owed.”
I drop the envelope at her office on my lunch break and come back to the shop feeling lighter than I did an hour ago. Not because anything’s resolved, but because someone competent is handling it, and for the first time in this whole mess I’m not the one doing all the handling.
Wes is here when I get back. He’s been sanding the window frames, and the whole front of the shop smells like fresh wood.
There are two coffees on the counter. He got me one without asking, which he’s started doing most days, and next to it are several of those little pods of chocolate caramel creamers from the gas station.
I haven’t told him how I take my coffee. Not once. He just noticed.
“Thanks,” I say, and I pick it up and peel open a creamer, and I don’t make it into more than it is because I can’t afford to right now. But I notice. I file it somewhere I’ll maybe come back to later.
“The window frames are in better shape than I thought,” he says. “Saved you a couple hundred bucks.”
“Best news I’ve gotten all day.”
He goes back to sanding, and I go back to my flowers. The rest of the week is when the town starts catching up to what I already know. Donna calls me one evening while I’m eating leftovers at the kitchen table. She doesn’t bother with small talk.
“So, I was at The Rail tonight,” she says. “Drew and Sabrina were there. Again.”
“Okay,” I say because I don’t really want to know what they’re up to but then again I do want to know what they’re up to. If I just say okay, then I’m not responsible for what she tells me or doesn’t tell me.
“Rachel, she was on her phone half the time, and I don’t mean like on a work call or something.
He was talking and she was scrolling. She even took selfies while she ignored him.
Didn’t even pretend to hide it. And when he tried to hold her hand across the table she pulled away to pick up her drink.
It was...” She pauses, looking for the word.
“So awkward… If she really loves him, she’s got a funny way of showing it. ”
I don’t say anything for a second because I know she doesn’t love him. I’m thinking about Sabrina in my shop. I came back to see if I still could. And I could. The game was the getting. Now she’s got him, and he’s just a man across a table who isn’t interesting enough to put her phone down for.
“Are you okay?” Donna asks. “I know this is weird to hear.”
“It’s not weird,” I say. “It’s just not surprising.”
She’s quiet for a beat. “You saw this coming?”
“Something like it.”
I don’t tell her about Sabrina’s visit. I don’t tell anyone.
That’s mine, and I’m holding it, not because I’m building toward something but because letting it go means getting involved, and getting involved means caring about what happens to Drew, and I’ve used up every bit of caring I had for that man.
Two days later, Brenda calls.
“He showed up at my house,” she says. “Wanted to talk. I let him in because he’s my son and I can’t not, but Rachel, he looks rough.”
“Rough how?”
“Anxious… Which he’s never really been. He kept checking his phone while we were talking, and when I asked him how things were going with Sabrina he hesitated before he said good.” She’s quiet for a second. “I asked him if she makes him happy. You know what he said?”
“What?”
“He said she makes him feel alive… Which is not the same thing as happy, and the fact that he doesn’t know the difference is why we’re all here.” I almost laugh but keep my composure. “He asked about the shop,” she adds, more carefully now. “How it was going. Whether you were doing all right.”
“He could ask me that himself if he really wanted to know.”
“I told him the same thing. He said he didn’t think you’d want to hear from him.” She pauses. “He’s keeping tabs on you through me. Wants to know how you’re doing but won’t pick up the phone and find out. That tells you everything about where his head is.”
It does. He’s checking the door again, but not Sabrina’s door this time. Mine. Making sure it’s still there, making sure I’m still somewhere he could reach if he needed to. The same thing he did for ten years, just from a different angle.
I’m not a door. I’m not a backup plan. And I’m not giving him any meaningful updates through his mother.
“Tell him the shop’s fine,” I say. “Tell him I’m fine.”
The conversation sits with me after we hang up.
Not because I feel sorry for Drew. I used up my reserve of sorry around the same time I used up caring.
But because it confirms what I’ve been watching from a distance.
He thought leaving me was the climax. The big romantic act, the man choosing fate over safety.
He didn’t think about what happened next because in his version of the story, the next part was supposed to be the happily ever after with Sabrina.
Instead, the next part is Sabrina scrolling her phone over dinner and pulling her hand away from his.
The next part is him getting anxiety and telling his mother he feels alive in a voice that sounds like he’s trying to convince himself.
The next part is finding out his ex-wife opened a flower shop and didn’t bother to tell him, because he stopped being someone she updates.
I knew this would happen. Sabrina told me herself.
And I could have warned him. I could have called him the same afternoon she left my shop and said, Drew, you need to hear what she told me.
I could have managed this the way I managed everything else for ten years.
Stepped in. Smoothed it over. Saved him from himself.
I didn’t, and I’m not going to.
Not because I want him to suffer, although I won’t pretend that watching him figure it out on his own doesn’t carry a certain satisfaction.
I’m not going to warn him because warning him would mean I’m still his safety net.
It would mean I’m still the woman who calls his mother back when he can’t be bothered and books the repair and takes care of making sure the bills are paid.
It would mean that even after everything, I’m still managing him, and I am done managing Drew George.
He wanted honesty. He wanted to find out what was real. He’s finding out.
At the shop, things keep moving forward.
The window frames are done. The cooler alcove is framed out.
I’ve got wholesale accounts set up with two suppliers and a third one pending.
I spend an afternoon painting the walls the warm white I picked out the morning Sabrina came to gloat, and when I step back and look at it in the late sun, it looks exactly right.
I’m locking up when my phone buzzes. Donna again.
Heard Sabrina’s been going out without Drew. Twice this week. Once to that wine bar in Granville with people nobody recognized. Just FYI.
I read it and put the phone in my bag before driving home.
The house is quiet. It’s been quiet for weeks now, but it doesn’t ring the way it did at first. It’s a different kind of quiet. The kind that belongs to me instead of the kind that was left behind by someone else.
I eat dinner and review Patricia’s notes on the divorce settlement, because she sent over a counter-proposal that asks for considerably more than Drew’s clean split.
Every line of it is backed up with ten years of receipts.
Ten years of me managing the household so he could build the business.
Ten years of me giving up income-earning work to keep everything running.
Patricia put a dollar figure on that, and it’s a number that would make Drew’s lawyer very uncomfortable, which is exactly the point.
I go over it twice. I sign where Patricia told me to sign. I put it in the envelope she provided and set it by my keys for the morning.
Then I go upstairs. I don’t think about Drew or the wine bar he probably doesn’t know about.
I don’t think about Sabrina in a town she’s already bored with.
I think about dahlias and window frames and wholesale pricing and how I might be able to set up some sort of flower bar rental for parties, and I fall asleep in a bed that doesn’t feel too big anymore.
It just feels like mine.