9. Christine #3
“I can’t do this. I can’t stand here and watch you cry and feel sorry for you.”
“I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me.”
“Then what are you asking?”
He stands slowly, carefully, Isabella still cradled against his chest. Crosses to me. Stops close enough that I can smell his cologne - sandalwood and something warmer, the one I picked out for him years ago, the one that still makes my chest ache with memories I can’t afford.
“I’m asking for the chance to fix this. To prove I can be better. To earn back-”
“You can’t earn back those twelve hours.” The words are ice. I need them to be ice. “You can’t earn back the first time I held her and wished you were dead because it was easier than knowing you just didn’t come. You can’t earn back two years of sleeping alone in a bed you were technically in.”
I take a breath.
“Some things are just broken, Benedict.”
“I know.” His voice has been sanded down to nothing.
He holds my gaze, and I see it there - the desperation, the determination, the love he forgot how to show until it was too late.
“I will wait forever if that’s what you need.”
Isabella makes a small sound. Content. Safe in her father’s arms.
I look at my daughter. At my husband. At the ruins of everything I thought my life would be.
“I want you to leave now.”
“Christine-”
“That’s enough for today.” I reach for Isabella. “Give her to me.”
He doesn’t fight. Transfers our daughter back with heartbreaking gentleness, his fingers brushing my arms in a way that makes me flinch - not from fear, but from the electricity of contact I wasn’t prepared for.
“I’m going to file a custody arrangement,” I say, not looking at him. “You’ll have visitation rights. We can work out the details through lawyers.”
“I don’t want to see my daughter through lawyers.”
“Then you should have thought about that before you missed her birth.”
The words land like bullets. I watch them hit, watch his face crumple, and I feel nothing.
That’s a lie too.
He stops at the edge of the room. When he speaks again it’s quieter, and it isn’t aimed at me so much as at himself.
“I called you forty-seven times. I know the number because I counted them, which should have told me something.” He swallows.
“You asked me for space and I kept handing you my panic to hold instead. I won’t do that again.
Whatever way you want me to reach you - your mother, a lawyer, a letter, nothing at all - you pick it, and that’s what I’ll use. ”
“I’ll go,” he says quietly. “But I’m not giving up. I will never give up on us. On you. On our family.”
“We don’t have a family. We have a legal agreement and a child caught in the middle.”
“We have everything.” He moves toward the door, pauses with his hand on the knob. “We just forgot how to see it.”
He looks back at me one last time.
“I love you, Christine. I never stopped loving you. I just forgot how to show it.”
“Words are easy.”
“I know.” He opens the door. “That’s why I’m going to show you instead.”
He leaves.
I stand in the middle of my mother’s tiny living room, holding my daughter, and let myself cry for the first time since he arrived.
I cry until Mom comes home with groceries. I cry until Isabella needs to be fed. I cry until there’s nothing left but a hollow ache where my heart used to be.
***
The doorbell rings again that night.
I’m in no state to answer - red-eyed, sniffling, still wearing the same pajamas - but Mom is bathing Isabella, and the ringing is insistent. Demanding.
It’s not him. I know it’s not him, because he left hours ago, and even Benedict Morgan isn’t cruel enough to come back the same day.
But when I open the door, there’s no one there.
Just a messenger, disappearing down the stairs, and a thick envelope on the mat.
I pick it up. Official paper, expensive. The kind lawyers use.
My stomach drops. The divorce papers. Already. I thought I had more time, thought-
I open it.
It’s not divorce papers.
It’s a deed. To the penthouse. Transferred to my name. Full ownership. No strings, no conditions, no caveats.
A note falls out, handwritten on his stationery:
I don’t deserve to live where we built our life. But you do. - B
I stare at it for a long time.
The penthouse. Twelve thousand square feet of memories - our first night dancing in the empty living room, the nursery I built alone, the bedroom where we made Isabella, the kitchen where we fought, the door he walked out of again and again.
He’s giving it to me. All of it. Like he can buy his way back into my good graces with real estate and grand gestures.
But that’s not what this is, whispers a small voice. That’s not what this is and you know it.
This is surrender.
This is a man who has nothing left to offer except the physical space of their failure, handed over without conditions, because he knows he doesn’t deserve to keep it.
I don’t know what to do with it.
I don’t know what to do with any of this.
I fold the deed carefully, put it back in the envelope, and set it on the counter. Tomorrow’s problem. Next week’s problem. Someone else’s problem entirely.
Isabella cries from the bathroom.
I go to her.