9. Imogen #2
My feet find his stride. I let him steer me off the main sidewalk and down a side street where the buildings lean close and the cameras don’t follow, and the noise thins, and the lenses fall away behind us, and then it’s just the two of us standing in the narrow quiet between two brick buildings, both breathing harder than a half-block walk should cost.
His hand is still on my back.
For one heartbeat, I let it stay.
One heartbeat of the old reflex, his body between me and the world, his hand in the exact familiar place at the base of my spine, the weight and heat of a man I spent three years leaning into every single time the outside got too loud.
My shoulders want to come down and my head wants to tip toward his chest.
Every trained response in my whole body is screaming at me to fold into the shelter of him and let him take the rest.
The almost is so close I can taste it.
And here is the thing I keep learning about my own body.
It has spent three years reaching for this man.
The first thing I did every morning of our marriage was reach across the bed for him, before my eyes were even open, before I remembered whether he’d come home at all.
Reaching was the native language of my hands.
Now I’m standing in this alley and I can feel them wanting to do it again, wanting to close the six inches between us and hold on, because holding on to Hendrix is the most fluent thing I know.
Then I remember what the shelter actually was.
The shelter had cold sheets. The shelter had canceled weekends and unread texts and a whole year of afters.
The shelter chose a blank page over me every night and called it ambition, wrote a book about another woman and swore it meant nothing, and let the nothing swallow my marriage whole.
The shelter felt exactly like this, warm and certain and safe, right up until the moment I needed it and found the room empty.
Comfort is not the same thing as safety. I can be touched by him and still be leaving. I can feel his hand at my back and still know that the back it’s resting on carried everything by itself for a year.
So I step forward. Out of his reach. On purpose.
His hand falls away into the air where I used to be.
“Thank you,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than the rest of me feels. “For getting me out of there.”
“Of course.” He’s watching me with the full-beam focus I know far too well, the whole of Hendrix Carver’s attention aimed at the one person in the world he can’t stop looking at. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Imogen. Please, just listen to me for a second.”
The words come fast now, urgent, a man who has finally gotten her in a quiet room and knows it won’t last.
“The interview was cut. What aired wasn’t what I said.
They edited out everything, minutes of it, everything I said about you, and left the part that made me look like…
and I don’t think it was an accident. I have reason to believe the whole thing was arranged.
The leak, the timing, the show they put me on, Shane, all of it.
I’m still pulling it apart, but if you’ll just let me walk you through what I’ve found… ”
“Hendrix.”
“…because once you see the whole picture, you’ll understand that the man on that broadcast is not what happened in that chair, and the book was never…”
“Hendrix.” I hold up my hand. Flat, tired. Not angry, just done. “Stop.”
He stops.
“Just sign the papers.”
The words come out quiet.
Simple. The simplest sentence I’ve said in weeks, and somehow the truest.
“Just sign them. Agree to the divorce. Let us both stop performing this marriage for an audience that already decided how it ends.”
I meet his eyes and I don’t look away.
“I don’t want an explanation. I don’t want the whole picture.
I don’t want to hear about edits or timelines or who did what to whom.
Maybe it’s all true. Maybe none of it is.
It doesn’t change the year I spent alone in that house waiting for you to notice I was still in it.
I want you to sign the papers, Hendrix, and let me go. ”
His face does a thing I have never once seen it do.
Every rehearsed sentence, every prepared argument, every careful line he walked into this alley holding, all of it empties out of him at the same time, and what’s left standing there is just a man on a side street watching his wife ask him to release her, with no words left in any language he was ever fluent in.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I mean it more than I’ve meant anything in three years.
” My voice doesn’t shake. My eyes stay dry.
I am standing on my own two feet in my own clothes on an ordinary street, telling the man I married that the marriage is over, and I am not apologizing for a single syllable of it.
“Sign the papers. Please. Let it be done.”
His mouth opens. Closes. Opens again and finds nothing at all.
Still, I don’t stay to soften it. I don’t offer him a maybe or a let-me-think or a compromise that would let us both keep bleeding politely for another month.
I don’t reach for his hand the way he reached for mine in that bedroom, because reaching is the whole story of my marriage, three years of my hands stretched toward a man who was always one room away, and I am finally, finally done reaching.
Instead, I turn around.
Then I walk away.
And I don’t look back.
For the length of that block, my heels on the concrete and the alley narrowing behind me and the open street widening ahead, I feel lighter than I have in years.
Not happy. Not yet, maybe not for a while.
But lighter, in the specific way of a woman who just set down a weight she’d been carrying so long she’d forgotten it wasn’t part of her own body.
Behind me, I can feel him watching. I can feel the shape of his silence trailing me down the alley, weighted with every unsaid thing he came here to say and never got to.
I keep walking.
The lightness holds.