7. ABRAHAM
AbrAHAM
IWRAPPED THE MEETING with the young crewman, promising I’d be in touch, then watched him exit the bar before pulling up the final appraisal on my cell again.
More reactions than questions, my imagination ran wild with worse case scenarios, because that’s who I was now.
I’d always suspected Nineah had more money than she’d disclosed.
Though I’d never asked directly, I knew she was the highest paid employee at FX and she spent it like a fucking Kennedy, but the leap from twenty-thousand-dollar limited edition handbags to a custom fishing yacht in the seven figures was a damn HAHO jump.
That was the kind of net worth that firmly placed someone in the category of potential target.
I swiped a hand over my jaw. This wasn’t my problem anymore.
The sooner I accepted that, the better. Whatever Nineah’s reasons were for her secrets, she’d made it clear that vulnerability was a hard limit and ultimately, it’d been my inability to accept that, that’d led to the dissolution of our marriage.
I shouldn’t have been digging deeper, looking for more meaning behind the way she’d unilaterally decided to shut me out of her life.
Sometimes, shit happened and people changed, and the best thing to do was accept that you couldn’t change that.
Still, my instincts weren’t off.
The late phone calls she took when she didn’t think I was listening.
The meetings she had in secret while I was on assignment…
I wasn’t so unimaginative, I was assuming an affair like I’d led Vanessa to believe, but my stunt today would have put Nineah on guard, pushing her to chart one of two courses—redirect or abort ship—and I wanted to see what she’d do.
Finishing the last of my beer, an uninvited memory resurfaced before I could shut it down.
I sat in my wife’s office chair, avoiding the communal areas of my own damn home as I watched her on the large main monitor that sub-headed the other smaller ones in her work station.
Nineah hadn’t stepped foot in this room in months and ironically, it felt like the only place untouched by my bullshit life.
Exhausted, hiding from my own wife like a little bitch, I studied the screen as she rose from the sofa, pacing in circles, talking to herself, only to return to her place on the couch. Rinse. Repeat.
I knew she was working up the nerve to come search for me. To start the conversation both of us had been skirting around for weeks.
From an objective lens, it was comical. Just over six months ago, we’d been planning our second anniversary. Now we were two strangers, hiding on opposite ends of the fucking house.
Our therapist who’d administered endless injections of positivity at the beginning had stopped trying to assure me, and turned their focus toward preparing me.
All of the sudden, plausibility and possibility were separate conversations and managing my expectations had been the theme of my new normal.
The general consensus had spoken. And I was the only one who hadn’t yet accepted the truth despite the mounting evidence—my wife had given up on us. On me.
On screen, Nineah walked over to the wall where the largest framed portrait in the house hung.
Reaching for the canvas, her fingers loosely tracing the photo, she stared at it like it was a stranger though she was the one who’d pulled the ladder in from the shed to hang it there herself just months ago.
My phone buzzed on the desk.
Glancing at the screen, I read the Caller ID of the number I’d been waiting on for the last twenty minutes and picked up. “Yeah.”
There was a heavy silence. Then, “Virginia has no official filing process. Nothing on public record.”
I watched my woman watch a fucking photograph. “Not what I asked. Clerk’s office doesn’t recognize legal separation, only intent.”
My boss hesitated on the other line, the rarity of it not lost on me. “This is your wife.”
My wife left me a long time ago. “And?”
“And the fact that you’re on the phone with me instead of speaking to her means you’re no longer trying to fix the problem, but prepare for the fallout,” he said. “She should be part of that conversation.”
“You giving me relationship advice now?”
“I’m giving you the reality. Book a legal consult and get your shit together. The right way. Nobody in your position—”
“Nobody’s in my fucking position.” Setting down the untouched bottle of beer I’d been holding for over an hour, regretting my decision to come to him in the first place, I reached for the monitor and touched the pixelated rendering of a woman I’d barely spoken to in weeks.
I should’ve been able to take comfort in the acceptance—there was something to be said for the absence of choice—but deep down, I knew I’d never get over this.
Not while the only person I’d ever loved was locked away somewhere inside herself.
While every day that passed, I had to pretend it didn’t gut me when she stepped back as I approached her or when she watched me like if she took her eyes off me for ten seconds, I’d attack.
“She’s handed in her resignation,” Matthias said, finally. Then confirming what I’d known the second he’d picked up, he destroyed my life in two words. “I’ve accepted.”
Talk about intent.
She wasn’t just leaving me. She was running.
“I’m also putting you in for administrative leave,” he continued.
“Negative.”
“Not a suggestion. Your job will always be here, but you need time to get your house in order.”
Time to get my house in order. Not time to fix my marriage. Not time to get my wife back.
I cut the monitor off.
The former CAG operator cleared his throat. “What’s happened to her, what’s happening to you… it’s unfair. And as your friend, if there is anything you need, you only have to ask. That being said, you need to take a fucking beat and that’s an order.”
“Yeah,” I slurred. “Call me when it’s one of your wives.” I hung up on the man who signed my checks, then rolling over to the end of the L-shaped workstation where Nineah kept her gun locker, I pressed my thumb to the reader until the lock disengaged, then removed the holstered Glock.
Ejecting the magazine, I removed the bullets one by one, then pulled back the slide and shook the last out of the chamber. After putting her weapon back in the safe and retrieving the other two boxes of 9mm ammo, I went to the small ensuite, opened the lid of the toilet and dumped it all in.
Seconds later, I vomited into the bowl.