17. Emily
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Emily
One more meeting and I’m free.
That’s the thought I hold onto all morning, like a stone in my pocket I keep reaching for. One more room, one more set of papers, Henry’s signature next to mine, and then it’s done.
I didn’t even want to do this part. My lawyer called last week and said Henry was dragging his feet on signing, finding little things to dispute, petty nonsense that can stretch a divorce out for a year if a man’s spiteful enough, and Henry is exactly that spiteful.
Then his lawyer floated a deal. Henry would sign everything, no fighting, no delays, on one condition.
He gets one last meeting. Face to face. He says he has things he needs to say to me.
I almost told them no. I don’t owe Henry a conversation, I don’t owe him closure, I don’t owe him the satisfaction of one more shot at me across a table.
But a year of legal back-and-forth versus one hour in a room?
I’d sit through worse than Henry for that.
So I said fine. One meeting. He says his piece, he signs, and I never have to look at him again.
Two years of my life closed out and filed away in an afternoon.
I dressed for it carefully this morning, which I’m a little embarrassed about.
Not for him. For me. A blazer that makes my shoulders look like they mean business, the lipstick I never wore when we were married because he said it was too much, hair down because he always wanted it up.
Armor, basically. I stood in front of my closet in this house that still doesn’t quite feel like mine and picked every single thing he’d have hated, and it felt fantastic.
Richard finds me in the kitchen pretending to drink coffee I’m too keyed up to taste.
“Let me come with you,” he says.
“It might make things worse. You know how Henry gets when he feels cornered. If he sees you, he’ll make it about you instead of the papers.”
“I don’t care.”
“Richard.”
“I don’t.” He sets his own mug down. “I’ll stand in the back. Won’t say a word, won’t make it about me, I swear. You run the whole thing. But I’m not letting you walk in there by yourself. Not this one.”
I look at him, at the set of his jaw, and I know there’s no winning this. And the truth is I don’t want to win it. The thought of him at my back in that room loosens a knot in my chest I didn’t know was clenched.
“Fine,” I say. “But you stay in the back. You don’t engage unless I ask you to. This is mine to finish.”
“Yes ma’am.” He catches my hand as I pass, turns it over, presses a kiss to my palm. “You’re going to be fine. You’ve already done the hard part. This is just the paperwork on it.”
The lawyer’s office is all dark wood paneling and not nearly enough windows, a room designed to make people feel small and serious. Henry’s already there when we walk in.
He looks terrible. That’s the first thing I notice, and I’m not proud of how good it feels.
He’s thinner than I’ve ever seen him, the skin under his eyes gone gray and bruised-looking, his shirt a size too big now at the collar.
Mrs. Potts said he looked like death and she undersold it.
Whatever the dream life with Carmen is doing to him, it’s eating him alive from the inside, and I sit down across from him and feel absolutely nothing soft about it.
His eyes go straight past me to Richard, who takes up a position by the wall, hands in his pockets, perfectly calm. And I watch it click. Henry’s jaw goes tight, because he’s seen this man before, across a reunion hall, watching me leave on his arm.
“Him.” Henry’s lip curls. “That’s the guy. From the reunion. You brought your little boyfriend to our divorce?”
“He’s with me.”
“This is private. This is between us. I didn’t agree to some other guy sitting in on...”
“You don’t get to agree to anything about my life anymore.” It comes out flat, and I watch it land on him, watch him flinch. “That stopped the day you fucked another woman. He stays.”
Henry’s lawyer, a tired-looking man with a folder he keeps squaring against the table, clears his throat and says that his client has requested to address me directly before we proceed. He says it like a warning, like he already knows it’s a bad idea and can’t stop his client from making it.
I lift an eyebrow. “Fine. Speak.”
Henry leans forward, and just like that the anger drops off his face and a wet, pleading look slides into its place, so fast it’s almost a costume change.
“Emily. Baby. Please.” His voice cracks right on cue. “I love you. You have to know that. I made a mistake, one mistake, and I have regretted it every single day since. I lie awake thinking about it. I can’t eat. Look at me, I’m falling apart without you.”
“A mistake is forgetting an anniversary, Henry.” I don’t keep my voice down.
“You had a girlfriend. You had a whole baby with her. Carmen went quiet right about the time that kid would’ve been started, so I can do the math, and however long it was, it was long enough to build a whole second family across town while I sat home ironing your shirts. That’s not a mistake. Don’t insult me.”
“She came onto me, okay? You don’t know what it was like. She wouldn’t leave me alone, she kept showing up.” He’s still going for soft, still working the wounded angle, but it’s already fraying. “And you were so... you were always there. Always around. A guy needs room to breathe.”
“Room to breathe.” I laugh, mean. “You cheated on me and had a baby, and your excuse is I was around too much? In my own house? God, you’re pathetic. You’re actually pathetic, you know that?”
“That’s not fair.”
“You want to talk fair?” I’m leaning in now, because I’ve waited two years to say this and I’m done being polite about it.
“I asked your permission to buy groceries. I checked with you before I saw my own friends. I did every single thing you ever wanted, and you went and knocked up Carmen anyway. So don’t sit there and act like I drove you to it.
You did this. You’re just mad you got caught. ”
He doesn’t have an answer for that, and I watch him hate it. I watch the remorse he came in wearing start to curdle, because it isn’t working, because I’m not folding like I always used to, and Henry has never once known what to do with me when I don’t fold.
So he tries pity instead.
“You think I’m even happy?” The whine creeps in under the words. “You think I got some prize out of this? I’m miserable, Emily. I’m so goddamn miserable you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Good. I hope it’s awful. I really do.”
That’s not the reaction he wanted either, and it tips him fully over, the whole sad story pouring out of him like he’s been dying to dump it on somebody who’d get it.
“She doesn’t do anything. Carmen. She sleeps till noon, she won’t lift a finger with the baby, that’s all me, I’m up at three in the morning while she’s dead to the world.
She burns through money like it’s nothing and screams the house down if I say one word about it.
At least you kept things running. At least you were grateful. She just takes and takes and takes.”
“Oh my god.” I sit back. “You’re comparing us. You’re sitting in your own divorce telling me your mistress is a worse housekeeper than I was, like that’s going to win me back.”
“I’m saying I made a mistake!”
“You keep saying that word like it fixes something.” I shake my head. “You didn’t trip and fall into a whole second family, Henry. However long it was.”
And that’s when the last of the nice-guy act drops off him, because I won’t pity him and I won’t take him back and he’s run clean out of angles, so he goes for the only thing he’s got left, which is to drag me down into the mud with him.
“How do I even know it was just me, huh?” he shoots back, ugly and sudden. “You’re awfully cozy with the rich guy already. How do I know you weren’t doing the exact same thing the whole time? Maybe that’s why you were never in the mood. Maybe you had your own little...”
“Watch it.” Richard’s voice cuts in from the wall, low and flat, and the whole room goes still.
He hasn’t moved, hands still in his pockets, but the easy calm is gone out of his face.
“You don’t get to come in here and accuse her of your own garbage.
You cheated. You. Don’t you dare try to hang that on her. ”
I put a hand up before it goes further. I’ve got this. But God, the look on Henry’s face, somebody actually checking him for once, it’s almost worth the whole meeting.
“He’s right,” I tell Henry. “I never touched anyone else the entire time, and you know it. You can’t even picture somebody being faithful, because you weren’t. That’s a you problem, not a me one.”
“I came here to apologize,” he says, the words coming through his teeth now, “and you just want to humiliate me. You want to watch me beg.”
“I want you to sign the papers and go. That’s all I want from you, ever again.”
He laughs, an ugly little sound, and jerks his chin toward Richard at the wall.
“And what, you’ve got that all figured out?
That guy? You think he’s going to stick around?
” His mouth twists. “Men like that don’t stay.
You’re a novelty. Some sad little divorcée he’s playing house with till he gets bored.
You’ll be back to nothing in six months and you’ll wish you’d been smarter about this. ”
Behind him, I see Richard shift his weight again. I give him the smallest shake of my head. I’ve got this one.
“I’d rather have nothing than have you,” I tell Henry. “I mean that. I’d rather have absolutely nothing than one more day of being your wife.”
His lawyer leans in and murmurs fast and urgent, a hand half-raised toward Henry’s arm. Henry shakes him off without even looking.