9. Cameron
— ? —
Cameron
Three weeks of silence.
Three weeks of calling, texting, showing up at places I think she might be.
I’ve driven past Summer’s building so many times the doorman recognizes my car and shakes his head before I even roll down the window.
I’ve sat in the parking lot of the coffee shop Hannah used to love, the one with the lavender lattes she always ordered even though I teased her about drinking something that tasted like soap.
I’ve walked through the farmer’s market on Saturday mornings, scanning every blonde head, my heart stopping every time I catch a glimpse of wavy hair or hear a laugh that sounds like hers.
She’s blocked me everywhere except one email address, and even that only answers through her lawyer now. Every message I send comes back with the same cold response: Please direct all communication regarding the dissolution of marriage to my office.
Dissolution of marriage. Like our life together is a chemical compound being broken down into base elements. Like five years of loving someone can be reduced to paperwork and legal fees.
I’m at my desk when the courier arrives.
It’s barely nine in the morning and I’ve already been here for hours, staring at spreadsheets I can’t focus on, refreshing my email every thirty seconds like Hannah might suddenly decide to write me back herself.
The numbers blur together on the screen, meaningless, and I realize I’ve read the same quarterly report three times without absorbing a single word.
“Mr. Jasper?” My secretary appears in the doorway looking nervous. “Someone from a courier service is here. Says he needs your signature.”
I wave him in without looking up. I sign things all day, contracts and approvals and documents that keep the machine running while my actual life falls apart. One more won’t matter.
But when the courier hands me the envelope, I see the return address and my hand freezes. I scrawl something on his tablet and he retreats, leaving me alone with the thing I’ve been dreading since the night I came home to an empty house.
A law firm. Her lawyer’s firm.
I tear it open with hands that have started to shake.
PETITION FOR DISSOLUTION OF MARRIAGE
The words swim in front of my eyes. I read them again, slower, trying to make them make sense even though they’re perfectly clear. Even though I knew this was coming. Even though I’ve spent three weeks waiting for exactly this moment.
Irreconcilable differences. Petitioner seeks division of marital assets. Petitioner waives claim to…
I flip through the pages, scanning the legalese, and my chest gets tighter with every clause.
She’s not asking for the house, the house where we were supposed to raise children and grow old and build a life together.
She’s not asking for alimony, not asking for a percentage of the company, not asking for any of the things she’d be entitled to after five years of marriage to a man who makes more money in a month than most people see in a decade.
She just wants out.
She wants nothing from me except to be free of me.
I read through the financial section again because I must be missing it.
There has to be a catch, a hidden demand, some line that explains why a woman walking away from a billionaire husband would leave empty-handed.
But the pages say the same thing no matter how many times I read them: she wants the dissolution of our marriage and nothing else.
Not a single cent of my money. Not a single piece of our shared life.
Somehow that’s worse than if she’d tried to take everything. If she wanted my money, I could fight her for it. I could negotiate. I could drag out the proceedings for months, years, finding excuses to keep us legally tied together while I figured out how to win her back.
But she wants nothing. She wants to walk away clean, like our marriage was a mistake she’s correcting rather than a life she’s leaving. Like I’m not worth fighting over, not worth taking from, not worth anything at all.
I sweep everything off my desk.
The computer monitor crashes to the floor with a satisfying crunch.
Awards and plaques and framed photos scatter across the carpet, years of professional achievement reduced to debris.
Glass shatters somewhere, a sharp sound that matches the feeling in my chest, and I stand there breathing hard while the destruction settles around me.
My secretary screams from the doorway and backs away.
“Get out,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It sounds like a stranger’s, rough and hollow and dangerous. “Close the door.”
She disappears. The door clicks shut.
I stand in the wreckage of my office, surrounded by broken glass and scattered papers, and I look down at the debris.
The framed wedding photo lies face-up among the chaos.
The frame is cracked, a spiderweb of fractures across the glass, but the picture underneath is intact.
Hannah smiling up at me in her white dress, flowers in her hair, her hand on my chest and her eyes full of a love I didn’t know existed until I met her.
Both of us so fucking happy on a day that feels like it happened to different people.
I can’t bring myself to touch it. I can’t bring myself to look away, either.
A knock at the door. I ignore it.
Another knock, more insistent. Then it opens anyway, and Violet walks in without waiting for permission.
“I heard glass.” She takes in the destroyed office, her eyes sweeping over the chaos. A flicker of satisfaction crosses her face before she smooths it away. Then she spots the papers clutched in my hand. “Oh my. Are those divorce papers?”
I don’t answer. I’m still staring at the wedding photo on the floor, at Hannah’s smile, at the man I used to be who didn’t know yet how badly he was going to fuck everything up.
“It’s about time,” Violet says.
I look up.
She’s smiling. She’s actually fucking smiling, like my marriage imploding is the best news she’s heard all week, like she’s been waiting for this moment and it’s finally arrived.
“You were always too good for her anyway, Cameron.” She steps closer, picking her way through the debris with careful grace.
Glass crunches under her heels but she doesn’t seem to notice or care.
“She didn’t understand your world. Your ambition.
Your drive. She was always holding you back, wanting you home for dinner, wanting you to take vacations, wanting you to be less than what you are. ”
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me.” Another step closer.
Her hand reaches out to touch my arm, fingers curling around my bicep with a familiarity that makes my skin crawl.
“I’m just saying what everyone’s been thinking.
You deserve someone who appreciates what you’ve built.
Someone who understands that success requires sacrifice.
Someone who can actually keep up with you instead of whining about missed anniversaries. ”
I stare at her hand on my arm like it’s a snake I need to remove before it bites.
“Someone like me,” she finishes, and her smile widens.
The pieces click into place. All at once, like a lock finally turning, like a picture coming into focus after years of being blurry.
Hannah’s intuition. Her warnings about Violet that I laughed off, teased her about, dismissed as jealousy.
The messages that never got sent, all those nights Hannah waited alone because I thought she knew I’d be late and didn’t realize she was waiting in the dark wondering why I couldn’t be bothered to call.
The “forgotten” reminders about our anniversary, about dinner plans, about the small gestures that used to hold our marriage together.
The way Violet was always there, always hovering, always finding reasons to be close to me while my wife sat at home wondering where I’d gone.
“Did you send that message to Hannah?” My voice comes out quiet and dangerous, the voice I use in boardrooms when someone is about to get fired. “On our anniversary. The one I asked you to send when I was going to be late.”
Her eyes flicker. “I’m sure I-”
“You didn’t send it, did you? You didn’t send any of them. For months, every time I asked you to tell Hannah something, you just didn’t. You let her think I didn’t care enough to communicate. You’ve been sabotaging my marriage.”
“Cameron, that’s ridiculous-”
“Have you?”
The mask cracks. I watch it happen in real time, watch the pleasant professional facade she’s worn for years crumble away to reveal the ugly, triumphant thing underneath.
“So what if I didn’t?” She laughs, high and bitter, and her hand tightens on my arm before I shake it off.
“A year, Cameron. A whole year of birthday reminders and dinner reservations and call-your-wife-back notes, and you never once checked. You made it so easy. You didn’t want to go home to her anyway.
You wanted to be here, working, building something that matters, with someone who actually understands what drives you. I was doing you a favor.”
“You’re fired. Security will walk you out.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
Her face contorts with rage, the mask completely gone now, replaced by a raw viciousness I’ve never seen before but that Hannah probably recognized from the beginning.
“You think you’re such a catch?” She grabs her purse from where she’d set it on a chair, her movements jerky and violent.
“You humiliated your wife on national television and now you’re freaking out because she left?
You fucking PRICK. You did this to yourself, Cameron.
You’re the one who said those things on camera.
You’re the one who chose work over her every single time she asked for your attention.
I just made sure she knew what she was dealing with. ”
“Get out.”
“She watched that interview, you know. That’s what broke her, not me.
Seeing you turn her into entertainment while the audience laughed.
” She’s at the door now, turning back for one final shot.
“You think firing me changes anything? You already lost her. You lost her long before I got involved. You were just too busy congratulating yourself to notice.”
She storms out. I hear her heels clicking down the hallway, fast and furious, and then the distant ding of the elevator carrying her away.
I sink into my chair, surrounded by the wreckage of my office, and I think about what she said.
The interview. Of course. Hannah saw the interview, saw me smile for the cameras and call her scatterbrained and serve her up to a laughing audience.
I knew she was upset about it, knew from the morning phone call that the day had gone wrong, but I was too tired and too distracted to actually listen to what she was trying to tell me.
And the messages. All those times I asked Violet to let Hannah know I’d be late, to send my apologies, to pass along that I was thinking about her even if I couldn’t be there.
Hannah spent night after night wondering why her husband couldn’t spare thirty seconds to send a text.
And for the past year it was worse than she knew: Violet intercepting everything, building a wall between us one deleted message at a time.
But Violet was right about one thing, the thing that burns worst of all. She didn’t say those words on camera. I did. She didn’t miss our anniversary. I did. She didn’t hang up on Hannah when she was trying to tell me something important. I did.
The sabotage made it worse. But the foundation was already cracked before Violet started pouring poison into it. I gave her the cracks to work with.
I pick up the divorce papers from where they landed on the floor. Read through them again, slower this time, looking at every clause and condition.
Petitioner waives claim to marital residence.
Petitioner waives claim to spousal support.
Petitioner requests only the return of personal effects and dissolution of the marriage contract.
She wants nothing. That’s the whole document. Nothing.
I pick up a pen from amid the debris on the floor. My hand hovers over the signature line at the bottom of the last page, the line that would end my marriage with a single stroke.
All I have to do is sign. Give her what she’s asking for. Let her go, let her build a new life without me in it, let her find someone who deserves her more than I ever did.
I put the pen down.
I’m not signing. I don’t care what it takes, what I have to do, who I have to become. Hannah is my wife, and I’m not letting her go without a fight.