Chapter 7
CHARLOTTE
The first week was the worst.
After Kate’s, Charlotte went back to her parents' house in Whitestone, Queens, the same three-bedroom where she'd grown up.
Her childhood bedroom had been converted into a sewing room, but her mother cleared the fabric off the twin bed, put fresh sheets on it and didn't ask questions.
Her father hovered in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, looking like he wanted to hit someone but didn't know the address.
"You need anything, honey?”
"I'm okay, Dad."
"Because I can go over there and—"
"Dad. I'm okay."
He nodded. Hovered for another moment. Then went to the kitchen and made her coffee the way he made her mother coffee, every morning, without being asked, for thirty-one years.
Charlotte held the mug and thought about her vows and didn't cry, because she'd used up everything she had on Kate's couch and there was nothing left.
Just a dry, scraped-out space behind her ribs where the feeling used to be.
Dominic called multiple times the first day.
She watched his name pulse on her screen, let each call ring through to voicemail, and then blocked his number.
The silence after was enormous. She kept picking up her phone and staring at the blank screen, her thumb hovering over the place where his name used to appear, and then setting it down again.
He switched to email. Three messages in two days.
She read the first one: Charlotte, I understand you need space, but I need you to know that what happened was not what it looked like — and deleted it before she reached the second paragraph.
She deleted the other two without opening them. Then she blocked that address too.
Flowers arrived at her parents' home. White peonies.
Her favorite, because she'd told him once and he'd filed it somewhere useful, the way he filed everything.
The card read: Please let me explain. — D.
Her mother brought them upstairs with a look on her face that was trying very hard to be neutral.
Charlotte stared at them for a long time.
Then she dropped them in the garbage can.
A car service showed up. Black sedan, tinted windows, the same company Dominic used to send for her.
The driver came to the door: Mr. Weston has arranged transportation whenever you're ready to talk.
Charlotte told him that she wasn't ready and would never be, and could he please tell Mr. Weston to stop sending things to her parents' home.
The driver left. She stood in the hallway with her forehead against the wall and breathed until her hands stopped trembling.
Kate came every evening. She'd show up after school with takeout and a bag of papers to grade.
They'd sit on Charlotte's twin bed with containers of lo mein balanced on textbooks, and Kate would talk about her day.
Which kid threw up during art, which parent sent an unhinged email about the science fair.
Charlotte would listen and nod and sometimes laugh, and the laughing was like finding a muscle she'd forgotten she had. Sore from disuse but still there.
"He sent a letter to the school," Kate told her one evening, chopsticks paused midair.
Charlotte looked up. "What?"
"Handwritten. Addressed to you, care of P.S. 34. Linda from the front office brought it to my room because she didn't know if you'd want it."
"What did you do with it?"
"I put it in my desk drawer. Do you want it?"
"No."
Kate nodded. Ate another bite. "He came by my apartment again last night. Sat in his car outside for an hour."
Charlotte closed her eyes. She could picture it.
Dominic in his dark sedan, engine idling, staring up at Kate's window, running calculations.
Trying to find the angle that would unlock this, the strategy that would bring her back to the negotiating table.
He didn't understand that there was no table. The table was gone.
"Did you talk to him?"
"I went downstairs and told him if he came back I'd call the police. He looked at me like I'd suggested something unreasonable." Kate shook her head. "He really thinks this is a problem he can solve."
"That's what I was to him," Charlotte said. "A problem he solved. He wanted a wife, I was the solution, and now the solution is malfunctioning and he can't figure out why."
Kate was quiet for a moment. "Charlie. Do you really believe that? That none of it was real?"
Charlotte picked at her lo mein. Did she believe it?
She turned the question over and over, and the answer kept shifting.
There were moments: the rooftop, the peonies, the way he'd looked at her during her vows with that unguarded fracture in his composure that felt genuine.
That felt like a man catching a glimpse of something he hadn't expected to see.
But then she'd remember the thumbs-up emoji, the earrings with no card, the phone calls he stepped out to take.
The relationship she'd poured herself into while he managed it from a distance, like a project that was proceeding on schedule.
"I think parts of it were real," she said. "I think he almost loved me. And I think almost is worse than nothing."
By the second week, she'd stopped checking whether he'd tried to contact her.
The blocked number, the blocked email, the returned flowers.
They'd created a perimeter, and inside it she was beginning to breathe again.
Her lungs remembered how to expand fully, without the bodice of a dress or the constriction of trying to be someone she wasn't.
She went back to school on Monday. She'd taken a week off — "family emergency," the principal had said to the substitute, and Charlotte was grateful for the vagueness.
Her fourth graders swarmed her when she walked in.
Tiny arms around her waist, voices overlapping: Miss Hoffman, you're back!
We missed you! Are you okay? Tommy said you went to space but I said that was dumb.
She knelt down and hugged as many of them as she could reach and thought: This is mine. This was always mine.
Oliver, the boy with the dragons, the one whose mother was sick, had left a drawing on her desk.
A dragon with a crown, breathing not fire but flowers.
Underneath, in careful handwriting: For Miss Hoffman because she is the best. Charlotte pressed the drawing to her chest, excused herself to the supply closet and cried for two minutes with the door closed.
And then she washed her face in the faculty bathroom and went back to teach fractions.
She was good at this. She'd always been good at this.
Somewhere in the fog of Dominic Weston, she'd forgotten that her life before him had been full.
Hers. Her classroom with its bulletin boards and reading corner.
Her students who drew her pictures, told her secrets and thought she'd hung the moon.
Her Friday nights with Kate, grading papers, drinking cheap wine and arguing about whether Pride and Prejudice was a romance or a social satire.
Her morning runs through the neighborhood, earbuds in, no destination, just moving.
She'd set all of it aside when Dominic appeared. He hadn’t asked her to, or maybe he had, in ways so subtle she hadn't recognized them as requests.
The dinners that always fell on the nights she'd planned to see friends.
The weekends at the Hamptons house that replaced her Saturday morning runs.
The gradual, imperceptible shrinking of her world to fit inside his, until she was living in his apartment, wearing clothes his mother approved of and practicing fork placement from YouTube tutorials she'd never told him about.
She was done shrinking.
Three weeks after the wedding, she signed a lease on a studio apartment in Sunnyside. Third floor of a prewar building with wide windows, a radiator that clanked and a kitchen so narrow she could touch both walls at the same time. It was what she could afford on a teacher's salary. It was hers.
Kate helped her move in. There wasn't much to move: her clothes, her books, a box of teaching supplies, the quilt her mother had made when she was twelve. Her things at the apartment she’d shared with Dominic had been sparse; he’d had the decency to have them sent to Kate’s, along with another letter she didn’t read.
And she’d sent her ring back to him, swallowing against the lump in her throat.
The furniture was secondhand: a bed frame from Facebook Marketplace, a bookshelf from a stoop sale in Woodside, a kitchen table with a wobble she fixed with a folded napkin.
She and Kate painted the bedroom on a Saturday afternoon.
Sage green, a color Charlotte had loved for years and never used because Dominic's apartment was all gray, white and chrome.
She hadn't wanted to suggest anything that didn't match.
Kate got paint in her hair, Charlotte got paint on her jeans.
They ordered pizza and sat on the floor eating it while the walls dried.
"This color is perfect," Kate said, tilting her head at the green.
"Yeah," Charlotte said. "It is."
That night, alone in her new apartment, Charlotte lay in her secondhand bed under her mother's quilt.
She listened to the radiator clank, the traffic outside and a neighbor playing music through the wall.
It was something slow, with horns. The ceiling had a crack that ran from the window to the light fixture, jagged and branching, like a river on a map.
She wasn't happy. That would come later, or it wouldn't. But she was here, in a space she'd chosen, in a life she was rebuilding with her own hands.
No one had picked this apartment for her.
No one had approved the paint color or arranged the furniture or sent a car to take her where they wanted her to go.
Charlotte rolled over, pressed her face into the pillow and let herself miss him.
One minute. She gave herself one minute to feel the absence: the warmth of his body, the sound of his breathing, how his arm used to drape across her waist in sleep, heavy and unconscious and close.
One minute for the version of him she'd loved, or almost loved, or convinced herself she loved because the alternative was admitting that she'd given her heart to someone who'd held it like a business card.
The minute passed. She opened her eyes.
She got up, plugged in her phone, set her alarm for six a.m., and went back to bed. In the morning she'd run. After that, she'd teach. After that, she'd come home to her sage walls, her clanking radiator and her life, which was ordinary, absent of Dominic, yet entirely, stubbornly hers.