6. Hannah
— ? —
Hannah
I pack with terrifying calm.
The suitcase comes down from the top of the closet, the big one we bought for our honeymoon in Italy, and I set it on the bed like I’m preparing for a vacation instead of the end of my marriage.
My hands aren’t shaking anymore. Something has settled in me, cold and certain, and I move through the bedroom with the efficiency of someone who has already made the decision and is just executing the plan.
Summer’s on speaker, her voice filling the silence while I fold sweaters into neat squares.
“You’re doing the right thing,” she says. “That video, I wanted to reach through the screen and strangle him.”
“I trusted him.” I pull open my underwear drawer and start transferring everything into the suitcase. “I told him things I’ve never told anyone. About my brain. About how hard I work to seem normal. And he served it up on camera.”
“He’s garbage. He’s always been garbage.”
“That’s not true and you know it.” I pause with a handful of socks, staring at the neat rows of Cameron’s boxer briefs in the drawer beside mine. “He wasn’t always like this. He used to be different. He used to see me.”
I remember the way he looked at me when we first started dating.
Like I was the most fascinating thing he’d ever encountered, like he couldn’t believe his luck.
He’d watch me across crowded rooms with this intensity that made my skin flush, and when I’d catch him staring, he’d just grin and shrug, completely unapologetic.
Can’t help it, he’d say. You’re the best view in any room.
Now I can’t remember the last time he really looked at me at all.
“And now he doesn’t,” Summer says, cutting through the memory. “That’s the point, Han. The man you married checked out a long time ago, and you’ve been married to a memory ever since.”
I let my eyes fall shut, letting the words land. She’s right. I know she’s right. But knowing something and feeling it are two different things, and right now all I feel is hollow.
“It’s not just the interview,” I say, resuming my packing.
“He’s been gone for years, Sum. I just didn’t want to see it.
Every missed dinner, every canceled plan, every time he looked at his phone instead of me.
I made excuses. I told myself it was temporary, that things would get better once the company stabilized, once the pressure eased up. ”
“The pressure was never going to ease up. That’s not how men like him work.”
“I know that now.” I move to the bathroom, gathering my toiletries into a bag.
My toothbrush sits next to his in the holder, and I stare at them for a moment, two brushes, side by side, like everything is normal.
Like we’re still a couple who shares a sink and fights over counter space and brushes our teeth together before bed.
His cologne is on the counter, that expensive stuff he switched to last year when Violet mentioned it was more “executive appropriate.” I used to love the way he smelled: soap and cedar and underneath it, just him.
Now he smells like a stranger, like a brand, like the image he’s trying to project instead of the man he actually is.
I take only my toothbrush. Leave everything else.
“Where are you going to go?” Summer asks. “You can stay with me as long as you need. The guest room is yours.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want to impose-”
“Hannah. You’re my best friend. You’re not imposing. Get your ass over here and let me take care of you.”
I feel the first prick of tears behind my eyes, but I blink them back. I can’t cry yet. If I start crying now, I’ll collapse, and I need to stay upright long enough to get out of this house.
The closet is the hardest part. Five years of my life hang here, organized by color and season.
Dresses I wore to his company events. Jeans I wore to lazy Sunday mornings.
And that red dress from Paris, the one he bought me on our second anniversary because he said it matched the color of my cheeks when I laughed.
I pull the red dress off its hanger and hold it against myself, remembering the afternoon he spotted it in the shop window and dragged me inside.
Try it on, he said, eyes bright with excitement.
I want to see. And when I came out of the dressing room, he just stared at me for a long moment, this look on his face like he was seeing me for the first time.
We’re buying it, he said, his voice rough.
And then I’m taking you back to the hotel and peeling it off you.
He did, too. Slowly, reverently, like unwrapping something precious. His hands tracing every curve, his mouth following, both of us laughing and breathless and so stupidly in love.
I shove the dress back in the closet. I can’t take it with me. It belongs to a different woman, a different marriage, a different life.
I take the essentials. Leave the rest. I can come back for it later, when he’s not here, when the house is empty and I can pack up my life without the memories swallowing me whole.
The bedroom feels smaller as I work, the walls pressing in, and I keep glancing at the door like I expect him to walk through it any second.
But he’s in New York. He’s in meetings. He’s doing all the important things that matter more than I do, and he’s a five-hour flight away.
Even if someone tells him, even if he comes, by the time he could get here I’ll be gone.
I zip the suitcase and wheel it to the front door, then stand in the foyer looking around at the house we built together.
The art we chose after three weekends of gallery-hopping.
The couch we argued over for a month because he wanted leather and I wanted fabric and we ended up with neither, just this neutral thing that satisfied no one.
The kitchen where he used to cook for me, badly.
The kitchen where he burned the pasta on our first anniversary and danced with me while the smoke alarm screamed.
I walk there now, running my fingers along the marble countertop where he lifted me up and kissed me breathless, where he promised me I would always come first. I can still feel the cold stone against my bare thighs, still feel his hands gripping my hips, still hear him laughing against my mouth when the alarm went off and we both ignored it.
Nothing on this earth outranks you, he’d murmured, and I believed him. God, I believed him completely.
The memory hurts so much I have to grip the edge of the counter to stay standing.
That man is gone. Maybe he was never really there at all. Maybe I just wanted to believe in him so badly that I invented him, built a version of Cameron out of hope and wishful thinking and ignored all the evidence that he wasn’t real.
I find our monogrammed stationery in the drawer by the phone, a wedding gift from his mother, cream paper with our initials intertwined, pretentious in a way I never would have chosen for myself. The irony isn’t lost on me.
Cameron,
I can’t do this anymore. Don’t look for me.
Hannah
I read it twice. It’s not enough. It doesn’t capture the years of loneliness, the slow erosion of my self-worth, the death by a thousand cuts of a marriage going quiet. But I don’t have words for all of that, not right now, and even if I did, I’m not sure he’d understand them.
So I leave the note on the kitchen counter.
And after a long moment, I slide my wedding ring off my finger.
The metal is warm from my skin, the diamond catching the afternoon light, and I stare at it for a long time. Five years of wearing this ring. Five years of believing in what it represented. I thought it meant forever. I thought it meant he chose me.
I remember the day he proposed, down on one knee on Karla’s porch surrounded by her roses, his hands trembling as he opened the box. He’d been so nervous, this confident, commanding man reduced to stammering, and I’d loved him so fiercely in that moment I thought my heart might burst.
I’ll spend the rest of my life making you happy, he promised. Every single day. I swear it.
I set the ring on top of the note.
My hand looks strange without it. Naked. Like I’ve amputated something.
I leave my key beside the ring and walk out of the house without looking back.
I turn off my phone before I start the car. I don’t want to see his name. I don’t want to be tempted to answer. I need silence, real silence, the kind where no one can reach me.
The drive to Summer’s takes forty minutes through traffic that doesn’t register. I move across Hollywood on autopilot, my body operating the car while my mind stays behind in that kitchen, standing next to the note and the ring and the life I just walked away from.
Summer meets me at her door with open arms and a bottle of wine, and the moment she pulls me into a hug, the calm shatters. I sob into her shoulder, ugly and raw, five years of disappointment and loneliness and grief pouring out of me in waves.
“I’ve got you,” she murmurs, stroking my hair. “I’ve got you. Let it out.”
She guides me to the couch and wraps me in a blanket and pours wine I can barely taste. She orders a pizza I can barely eat. She rage-watches the interview with me, pausing to curse every time Cameron opens his mouth, and her fury on my behalf feels like a balm on something wounded.
“And that Violet woman,” Summer says, refilling my glass for the third time. “Standing there like she owns him. I’ve never trusted her.”
“Cameron always laughed it off.”
“Cameron’s a fucking idiot who doesn’t deserve you.” She squeezes my hand. “What do you want to do?”
I stare at the ceiling. There’s a water stain in the corner, shaped vaguely like a bird in flight, and I focus on it while I try to find words for the thing that’s been building in me all day.
“I want a divorce.”
Saying it out loud feels like stepping off a cliff. Terrifying and irreversible and exactly right.
Summer doesn’t look surprised. She just nods, like she’s been waiting for me to catch up to the conclusion she reached hours ago.
“Good,” she says. “You deserve better.”
“I don’t know if I can afford a lawyer. I don’t even know how divorce works. Do I need to file something? Is there paperwork?”
“We’ll figure it out. Tomorrow. Tonight, you just need to rest.”
But I can’t rest. I lie on Summer’s guest bed staring at the ceiling, watching the shadows shift as cars pass outside, and I can’t turn my brain off.
I keep replaying the interview. The phone call.
Violet’s voice in his hotel room. The years of dinners I ate alone and nights I fell asleep waiting for him to come home.
I keep thinking about the man in that video with my husband’s face and none of my husband in him.
I keep thinking about Cameron’s hands. Those capable hands that used to cup my face when he kissed me, that used to trace patterns on my back while we fell asleep, that used to pull me close like he couldn’t stand even an inch of distance between us.
When did those hands start reaching for his phone instead of me?
When did I become less interesting than a notification?
At 11:47 p.m., I turn my phone back on.
The notifications explode. Missed calls, voicemails, texts. His name over and over, a wall of desperation I don’t have the energy to engage with.
I watch his name light up the screen one more time, another call coming through, and I decline it.
Somewhere up in the hills, he’s walking into an empty house. Finding the note. Finding the ring.
Good.