11. Hannah
— ? —
Hannah
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Cameron walks into my office, my office that I thought was mine, like he has every right to be there.
“Surprise.” His smile doesn’t reach his eyes. There’s a brittleness underneath it, a desperation, but his voice is steady. “I’m your anonymous benefactor.”
“You stalked me?” My voice comes out sharp, too loud in the quiet office. “You tracked down my business plans and bought your way into my company?”
“I hired a private investigator.” He says it like it’s a reasonable thing to do, like normal people hire PIs to track their estranged wives all the time. “You wouldn’t take my calls. You blocked me everywhere. Your lawyer sends back every letter I write. I needed to know you were okay.”
“You weren’t supposed to come looking!” I’m shouting now, but I can’t seem to stop. “That was the whole point of leaving, Cameron! The note said don’t look for me! The lawyers said no contact! What part of any of that suggested you should hire someone to spy on me?”
“I needed to see you.” He’s moved further into the room, closer to me, and I back up instinctively until my hip hits the edge of my desk.
Trapped, like the prey he’s been stalking.
The boxes I was unpacking an hour ago sit half-open around us, bubble wrap and packing tape and the mug Summer bought me that says WORLD’S OKAYEST BOSS, all of it suddenly looking like evidence of how thoroughly I walked into this.
“I needed to talk to you. And you made that impossible through normal channels, so I found another way.”
“This isn’t another way. This is manipulation. This is you using your money to force your way into my life after I explicitly told you I wanted out.”
“I prefer to think of it as creative problem-solving.”
“I don’t care what you prefer to think of it as!
” I want to throw something at him. I want to scream until my throat is raw.
I want to cry, and I hate that I want to cry, hate that he can still make me feel this way after everything.
“You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to ignore what I want and then show up with a checkbook like that makes it okay. ”
“You’re my wife, Hannah.”
“I’m your soon-to-be ex-wife. Sign the goddamn papers.”
“No.”
The word lands between us, flat and absolute.
“I’m here. It’s technically my building.
I own it through a company that doesn’t have my name anywhere on it.
” He’s moved further into the room now, closer to the window, positioning himself like he belongs in this space I thought was mine.
“And I’m not going anywhere until we have a real conversation. ”
“Then I’ll find another building.”
“With what money?”
The question stops me cold. I do the math in my head even though I don’t want to, even though I already know the answer.
The lease payments on this space, already locked in for a year.
The equipment I’ve ordered, the salaries I’ve promised to three developers who quit other jobs to work for me.
Every escape route priced beyond reach before I even knew I’d need one.
He watches me calculate and knows when I reach the total.
“This isn’t a conversation, Cameron. This is an ambush.”
“Call it what you want.” His voice softens slightly, some of the artificial calm slipping away to reveal the rawness underneath. “I call it fighting for my marriage.”
“We don’t have a marriage anymore.” I move around the desk to put solid wood between us, because I don’t trust myself when he’s this close.
I can smell his cologne from here, that stupid expensive cologne, and my body remembers things my mind is trying to forget.
Which is its own betrayal. Five years of sleeping next to someone trains your body in ways no lawyer can undo. “I filed for divorce. It’s over.”
“And I haven’t signed.” He reaches into his jacket and pulls out a folded document that I recognize immediately.
The divorce papers. I can see the tabbed pages, the empty line where his signature should go, a door he’s refusing to close.
“I’m not signing, Hannah. Not until we actually talk about what happened. ”
“There’s nothing to talk about.” I hate how my voice shakes, hate that he can still do this to me after everything.
“I spent years trying to talk to you. Years of asking you to come home, to have dinner with me, to put down your phone for five minutes and actually be present in our marriage. You didn’t want to talk then.
You wanted to work. You wanted to build your empire.
You wanted to be anywhere except in a room with me.
I sat at a table set for two on our fifth anniversary, watching the candles burn down, calling your office and getting a recording.
That was my marriage, Cameron. That’s what you want to talk about? Fine. That’s my opening statement.”
“I was wrong.” The words come out rough, like they cost him something to say.
“I know I was wrong. I was distracted and absent and I took you for granted every single day. But I didn’t understand what I was losing until you were gone.
I didn’t realize how much I needed you until I came home to an empty house. ”
“That’s not my problem anymore.”
I want the words to feel as good coming out as they sounded in my head all those weeks. They don’t. They just hang there, true and useless, while he looks at me like I hit him.
“Hannah.” He stands up, moves closer, and I press myself back against the window because I don’t trust what will happen if he touches me.
The glass is cold through my blouse and the city sprawls out behind me and I have nowhere left to retreat to.
“I know I hurt you. The interview, the missed dinners, all of it. I know. And I’m not asking you to forgive me right now.
I’m just asking for a chance to earn that forgiveness. ”
“It’s too late for that.”
“It’s not.” He’s close enough now that I can see the details I’ve been trying to forget.
The gray at his temples that wasn’t there a year ago, threads of silver in the dark hair I used to run my fingers through.
The new lines around his eyes, deeper than before, like he hasn’t been sleeping well.
His hands at his sides, and on his left one, the wedding ring he’s still wearing.
Mine sits in his pocket somewhere. I know because it’s not on my finger and it’s not in my jewelry box and he must have taken it from the kitchen counter along with my note. He’s still wearing his, and I’m not wearing mine, and that asymmetry feels like an accusation.
“I fired Violet. You were right about her. She admitted everything, the messages, the reminders, the emergencies she invented to keep me at the office, all of it. She was sabotaging us from the start, and I was too blind to see it.”
“How long?” My voice comes out strange and flat. “How long was she making sure your messages never reached me?”
“Close to a year.” He says it like the words taste rotten. “Maybe longer. I don’t know for certain.”
A year. A year of texts that never came and apologies that never arrived, all those nights I sat in our kitchen believing my husband couldn’t spare ten seconds for me, and the whole time there was a woman standing between us with her finger on delete.
“Of course she was.” I laugh, and the sound is bitter even to my own ears. “And you never noticed because you weren’t home. You were at the office every night until midnight, building your precious company, while she was cutting us apart one deleted message at a time.”
“I know.” His voice cracks on the words. “I know, Hannah. I see it all now. Everything I should have seen then.”
“Seeing it doesn’t fix it.” I push past him, putting the desk between us again because I need the barrier, need something solid to remind me why I left in the first place.
“You don’t love me. Not enough. You love your work.
Your company. Your legacy. I was just someone who came with the house.
Someone to keep your bed warm while you were busy conquering the world. ”
The words hit him like a physical blow. I watch the impact move across his face, watch his jaw tighten and his eyes go bright with something that might be pain or might be tears. His hands clench at his sides and for a moment he looks like a man who’s just been told someone died.
Good. Now he knows how I’ve felt for years.
“That’s not true.” His voice is rough, barely above a whisper. “Hannah, that’s not true. You’re everything to me. You always have been. I just forgot how to show it.”
“Then why did I eat dinner alone almost every night, watching the clock, waiting for you to come home? Why did I fall asleep reaching for you in the dark and finding nothing but empty sheets? Why did my husband go on national television and serve me up for laughs instead of defending me?”
He doesn’t have an answer. He just stands there, looking at me with those brown eyes I used to get lost in, and the silence stretches between us like a chasm.
“The money’s yours either way,” he finally says, and his voice sounds defeated in a way I’ve never heard before.
“Keep the building. Keep the funding. Fire me if you want.” He sets the divorce papers on my desk, right next to my keyboard where I’ll have to look at them every day. “I’ll be here Monday.”
He turns and walks out before I can respond. The door clicks shut behind him with a soft sound.
I stare at it, half-expecting it to open again.
He never came back through a door in five years of marriage.
He never turned around in an airport, never walked out of a meeting for my sake after that first anniversary, never once chose the room I was standing in over the one with the deal in it.
And some ridiculous part of me stands here anyway, watching the door, waiting for him to start now, today, when it’s finally too late to count.
I stand there, frozen, listening to his footsteps fade down the hall. The elevator dings, distant and final. The mechanical hum as it carries him down and away.
Only when the sound dies completely do I let my legs give out.
I sink down onto one of the moving boxes, surrounded by the unpacked pieces of the company he paid for, and I don’t know whether to sob or scream. He’s going to be here every day. In my space. In my face. Making it impossible to move on and forget and heal.
Monday. Two days away. I’ll have to see him in the elevator, in the hallway, in the conference room with the long table I picked out of a catalog he paid for.
I’ll have to learn how to run a company with my almost-ex-husband watching from across a floor plan he designed around me.
There’s a word for what he’s done, wrapping a cage in funding documents and handing it to me like a gift, and I’m too tired to find it.
And the worst part, the part that makes me want to put my fist through the window, is that when he said I’ll be here Monday, some stupid, stubborn part of me went quiet with relief.
I hate that part of myself. I hate that it still exists after everything he’s done.
I look down at the divorce papers lying on my desk. The petition I filed, the pages my lawyer drafted, his signature line blank, untouched, a silent refusal to let me go.