15. Rhodes
— ? —
Rhodes
The envelope is sitting on the kitchen counter when I get home.
It’s plain white, completely unremarkable, the kind of envelope you’d use to send a birthday card or a thank-you note. But my name is typed across the front in crisp black letters, and the return address belongs to a law firm I recognize because half my friends have used them for their divorces.
My wife filed separation papers while I was standing in her flower shop begging her to talk to me.
I don’t open the envelope immediately. I set down my keys, loosen my tie, and pour myself two fingers of whiskey that I know I won’t actually drink. My hands are steady. My breathing is even. I’ve negotiated billion-dollar deals without breaking a sweat. I can handle this.
I pick up the envelope.
It’s heavier than I expected. Thicker. There’s a whole packet of documents inside, financial disclosures, asset divisions, property agreements.
Maren hasn’t just filed for separation. She’s begun untangling eleven years of shared life with the methodical precision of someone who’s been thinking about this for a lot longer than I realized.
The whiskey burns going down. I pour another.
I don’t call.
Calling is what the old me would do, let a phone line carry the hard thing so I never have to stand in front of it. I’ve handled too much of my marriage by phone already.
I take the papers and my keys and I drive to Nora’s.
It’s a twenty-minute drive. I make it in fourteen. Nora’s building is a converted three-family on a street of bare October trees, and there’s a light on behind the second-floor curtains. Her windows now. Maren’s.
I press the buzzer before I can think better of it. Nothing. I press it again, and a third time, and then the intercom crackles and it’s Nora, her voice flat as a closed door.
“Go home, Rhodes.”
“I have to see her.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“Then let her tell me that to my face and I’ll go. I mean it. But I’m not doing this through a speaker box in a wall.”
The intercom clicks off. I stand on the cold stoop with a packet of legal documents in my hand and no idea whether anyone is coming down.
Two minutes later, the security door opens.
Maren.
She’s in leggings and an oversized sweater I don’t recognize, hair scraped back off a face with no makeup on it, and she looks so tired it knocks the wind out of whatever I drove here to say.
She pulls the door shut behind her, sealing off the warm stairwell light.
She’s decided this happens out here, on the steps, in the cold, where I don’t get to come in.
“Two minutes,” she says, arms already crossed.
I hold up the envelope. “You filed these while I was standing in your shop. While I was begging you to talk to me.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t think it was worth mentioning?”
“Would it have changed one thing you said?”
I open my mouth and shut it again. “That’s not the point.”
“Then what’s the point, Rhodes? You wanted to talk. Here I am. On my sister’s steps at nine at night, talking.”
“You went straight to ending it. Eleven years, and you didn’t come to me first.”
“We’ve been ending it for years. You just weren’t paying attention.”
“How was I supposed to end it, then?” Her breath fogs in the porch light. “Should I have booked a meeting? Had my assistant find a slot on your calendar, between your work and your dinners with Rachel?”
“That’s not fair.”
“Stop.” The word comes out sharp enough to cut. “Stop telling me what’s fair. You don’t get to decide that anymore.”
I look down at the envelope. The split inside is so scrupulously even it makes my chest ache, half of everything, exactly, like she wants nothing from me except to be gone. “You’re selling the house.”
“I’m not going to live in it. Are you?”
I think of the empty closet, the dried ranunculus on the nightstand I can’t make myself throw out. “No,” I admit. “I don’t think I can.”
“Then we sell it.” She says it the way you’d read an item off a list.
“I was a good husband once.” I hear how desperate it sounds and I can’t stop it. “I was there when you signed the lease on Bellamy Blooms. When you landed the Harlow wedding and cried in the walk-in cooler because you couldn’t believe it was real.”
“I know.” And for the first time her voice isn’t flat.
It cracks, right down the middle. “I loved that man. The one who came home. The one who asked about my day and actually waited for the answer. I loved him so much I stayed years past when I should have, waiting for him to walk back through the door.”
“I’m right here.”
“No.” She wraps her arms tighter around herself. “You’re not. And I can’t keep pretending you are.”
The cold is in my bones now. Hers too, I can see it, but she doesn’t go in. “So that’s it. You’ve decided we’re beyond saving and I don’t get a vote.”
“You had your vote. You had a thousand of them.” Her jaw is trembling, from the cold or the effort of holding steady, I can’t tell which. “Every dinner you canceled. Every time you looked straight through me like I was a lamp somebody left on. Those were your votes, Rhodes. You used every one.”
I should stop talking. I don’t. “Is there someone else?”
The question lands between us, and I watch it go off like a struck match.
“Are you serious.” It’s not even a question. Her whole body goes rigid. “You spent months letting the entire city think you and Rachel were a matched set, and you’re standing on my sister’s steps asking if I’m the one who found somebody?”
“I had to ask.”
“You really didn’t.”
“If there’s someone, I deserve to know.”
“There’s no one!” It tears out of her, loud enough that a light flicks on next door. She drops her voice, and the quiet is worse. “There’s been no one for eleven years. Not once. I took my vows like they meant something. I just needed you to take yours the same way.”
“I never touched Rachel.”
“I know that.” She laughs, and it’s an awful sound. “That’s the part you still don’t get. It was never about whether you slept with her. You chose her. Over and over, in a hundred rooms I wasn’t in. And when the whole world watched you do it, the one person nobody thought to protect was me.”
I don’t have an answer. She watches me not have one, and something in her face closes for good.
“Give me a pen,” she says.
“What?”
“A pen, Rhodes. There’s one page left.”
My hand moves before my brain catches up. The heavy pen she gave me for our fifth anniversary is in my jacket, and I hold it out, and she takes it without letting our fingers touch.
She flattens the last page against the brick beside the door and signs it there in the porch light, her breath clouding over her own name. Maren Bellamy. Not Calloway. Then she caps the pen, presses it back into my palm, and folds the papers against my chest until I have no choice but to hold them.
“Sign your half,” she says. “And then let me go.”
She’s already turning. The security door swallows her. Through the glass I watch her climb the first two stairs, and then Nora appears at the top and an arm goes around my wife, and the inner door closes, and I’m standing alone on a stranger’s stoop holding my marriage in a nine-by-twelve envelope.
The lock clicks, loud and final.
I drive home in silence. I sit in my kitchen for a long time, staring at the documents spread across the counter like a map of our marriage’s collapse.
There’s a section about the joint accounts.
A section about the properties we accumulated together, including the commercial space that houses Bellamy Blooms.
She’s not asking for anything unreasonable.
That’s what kills me. She could fight me for everything, the house, the investments, a significant piece of my company if she wanted to get ugly.
Instead, she’s asking for exactly half of what we built together.
Fair. Equitable. Like she just wants this to be over.
I can’t sign them. Not yet. Not until I’ve tried everything.
The next few hours blur together. I make calls I shouldn’t make, to Julian, asking about the legal implications; to my mother, who sounds unsurprised and disappointed; to Rachel, which I immediately regret when I remember Maren’s face at the mention of her name.
Around midnight, I find myself in the spare room that Maren used as a home office.
Nora didn’t take everything. There’s still a box in the closet, one that Maren must have asked her to leave, full of things from before. Before the company took over my life. Before the events and the press and the constant, crushing weight of success.
I sit on the floor and open it.
There are photos. Hundreds of them, printed the old-fashioned way because Maren always insisted that important memories should exist somewhere other than a cloud server.
Our wedding. Our honeymoon in Italy. The day she signed the lease for Bellamy Blooms, beaming at the camera with her keys in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other.
I look so young in these pictures. So present. I’m looking at her in every single one like she’s the only person in the room.
When did I stop looking at her like that?
There’s a dried flower pressed between two photographs, a crooked ranunculus, slightly browned with age.
I remember this one. It was from the first arrangement she ever made me, back when she was still working at her aunt’s shop, before we were even dating.
She kept one stem for herself. Said she was going to press it so she’d always remember the beginning.
I’m still holding it when I notice the smaller envelope at the bottom of the box.
It’s addressed to me, in Maren’s handwriting, but it’s never been opened. I turn it over. There’s a date on the back, three months ago. She wrote me a letter three months ago and never gave it to me.
I shouldn’t open it. It wasn’t meant for me to find, not like this.
I open it anyway.
Rhodes,
I’m writing this down because I don’t know how to say it out loud. I’ve tried. I’ve started this conversation a hundred times in my head, but the words never come out right when you’re in front of me.
I miss you. Not the you that exists now, I see that version every day, at events, on the news, in interviews. I miss the you that used to exist before. The one who came home, who listened, who made me feel like I was the most important thing in your world.
And I keep waiting for that person to come back. I keep thinking that if I’m patient enough, supportive enough, understanding enough, you’ll remember that you used to love me more than you loved your work. But I’m tired, Rhodes. I’m so tired of waiting.
I don’t know how much longer I can do this.
I love you. I love you so much it hurts. But loving someone isn’t enough when they’ve stopped loving you back.
Maren
She wrote this three months ago.
Three months of carrying this around, of waiting for me to notice, of hoping I’d see what she couldn’t bring herself to say out loud. And I didn’t. I was too busy with work and press coverage and making sure Rachel had everything she needed for the next event.
I’m still sitting on the floor when the sun comes up.
The next morning, I do something I haven’t done in years.
I call my assistant and tell her to clear my schedule. All of it. The meeting can wait, the work can be rescheduled, the press thing can happen without me.
I need to think. I need to figure out how to become the person my wife needs me to be.
The problem is, I’m not sure that person exists anymore. I’m not sure I know how to find him.
My phone buzzes. It’s Julian: Heard about the separation filing. Press is going to have a field day. Want me to draft a statement?
I read the message twice, then a third time.
Then I type back: No statement. This is personal.
Another buzz. Rachel: Are you okay? I heard about the papers. I’m here if you need to talk.
I almost respond. My thumb hovers over the keyboard, ready to type out something grateful, something friendly, something that would make me feel less alone.
But I remember Maren’s face. I remember the way she laughed when Rachel’s call interrupted us, like she wasn’t even surprised anymore.
I delete the draft and put my phone face-down on the counter.
Somewhere across the city, my wife is at a doctor’s appointment I’m not allowed to know about. Nora’s text said that much and nothing more. Going alone. Whatever it is, she’d rather face it by herself than let me near it.
I sit with that. It might be the cleanest measure of what I’ve done, that when something in her life gets big enough to frighten her, I’m the last person she’d think to call.
I stay on the floor of that office a long time, my wife’s letter in one hand and the pressed ranunculus in the other, trying to figure out how to save something that might already be too broken to fix.
But second chances don’t come to the people who sit still and wait for them. You have to earn them. You have to become worthy of them.
And I have no idea if I still can.
The separation papers are still unsigned on the counter. The ranunculus is still pressed between my fingers, fragile and dry and barely holding together.
My phone lights up with another text from Rachel.
I pick it up, ready to silence it like I silenced everything else.
But this time, I read it: Call me when you can. There’s something you need to know about Maren.
My blood goes cold.
I call her immediately.