Chapter Eight
Mandy
There's exactly one upside to being a lawyer when your own marriage collapses: you don't have to pay someone else to draft the paperwork.
I sat down at my laptop and wrote my own Petition for Divorce—cold, clean, clinical, the same way I'd write it for any client who walked through my door with a marriage already dead in her hands.
It didn't take long at all.
No kids, so custody wasn't even a line item. Property, savings, investments—split evenly, no arguing over who kept what. Clear terms. No gray areas left to fight over, no scraps left on the table worth clawing at.
I typed out each clause, each cold, precise sentence, and signed my name at the bottom without letting my hand shake.
For one strange second, I almost laughed.
I used to think our marriage was this vast, intricate structure—something that would take a lifetime of careful maintenance to hold up.
And here it was, reduced to four pages of standard A4 and a signature line.
Simple arithmetic. It felt less like the end of a love story and more like closing out a business account that had quietly gone insolvent months ago.
I didn't mail it.
The signed pages sat folded in the inner pocket of my handbag instead, like a wound I couldn't quite convince myself to let scab over.
This was Damon. The boy I'd loved since I was old enough to know what wanting someone felt like, through every long, aching year between adolescence and the altar.
After a lifetime of loving one person, didn't I owe myself at least a little room to hesitate?
To second-guess the finish line, I'd already crossed?
Over the next few days, Nico kept me updated in short, clipped texts.
Damon had been calling her nonstop, frantic, asking anyone who'd pick up where I'd gone.
Lucy called too, quieter, more careful—said he'd shown up at the office looking like a man who'd lost a case he never saw coming.
No pride left in him at all, she said. Just wreckage.
Those little scraps of news flickered like faint candlelight in the dead space where my heart used to be.
It meant something, didn't it? That he was falling apart. That losing me had actually cost him something.
Then Caroline called.
Her voice was calm, almost clinical, when she told me Damon had withdrawn from her case. He was a mess in every meeting, she said—distracted, unfocused, missing details a first-year associate wouldn't miss.
She didn't dress any of it up. She admitted, flatly, that she'd come back into his orbit still carrying old feelings for him, half-hoping something would reignite. And he'd done exactly what she expected—taken her case out of habit, out of pride, given her the shelter she'd come looking for.
"But Mandy." Something complicated moved under her voice—bitterness, maybe, or something closer to envy. "You mean more to him than I ever did. I've known that man for years, and I have never once watched him come apart like this over anyone. His work is slipping, Damon's work, because of you."
I sat frozen on the sofa long after the line went dead, my palms damp against the phone in my lap.
Caroline thought she was handing me good news. She had no idea what she was actually describing.
What she called Damon "falling apart" wasn't love finally cracking him open.
It was his flawlessly engineered world coming loose at the seams—a malfunction he hadn't planned for, hadn't priced into any equation.
He wasn't hunting for me because he'd finally learned how to love someone.
He was hunting for me because I was the missing piece that would snap his universe back into its clean, manageable shape.
"I don't understand, Caroline." My voice came out flatter than I expected, worn thin. "Why are you telling me any of this?"
A pause on her end. Then, bluntly: "Because I went back to him chasing old feelings. I thought he was still the same Damon—untouchable, always in control. And he was, at first. He took my case the second I asked, no hesitation, exactly like he used to."
Her tone shifted, wry now, tinged with something closer to resentment. "But I see it now, Mandy. You won. Once word gets out that you're divorcing New York's most eligible divorce attorney, you understand how many women are going to be circling him within the week?"
After I hung up, I sat alone in my apartment for a long time, phone still warm in my hand, watching the light change outside the window.
Caroline's words sat in front of me like a mirror—not throwing hostility back at me, but something far stranger. Something almost sad.
She was telling me I'd won. She still didn't understand—had never understood—that I was never competing with her for him in the first place.
Something finally released in my chest, slow and quiet, like a held breath finally let go.
Caroline's phone call handed me the last piece I needed. Our problem was never her. It was never going to be any specific woman, ever, not really.
Even without Caroline, there would always be another old friend in crisis, another important client who needed saving, another woman who needed his particular brand of competence and control wrapped around her like armor.
That was the machinery underneath Damon—built to rescue, built to fix, built to be needed by someone new the second the last emergency resolved itself.
And he would never once understand that while he played the flawless gentleman for the rest of the world, he was quietly, methodically grinding his own wife's sense of safety into dust underfoot.
It was never Caroline's presence that broke us.
It was Damon's blindness—his complete inability to see where a line needed drawing, or why my feelings should ever factor into where he drew it.
He genuinely believed fidelity started and ended with not sleeping with someone else.
He had no concept that a different kind of betrayal existed—quieter, colder, harder to name in a courtroom.
The betrayal of never once making me feel like I came first in a room he controlled completely.
Caroline thought I'd won.
But somewhere in three years of marriage, in the exact moment I found myself needing his breakdown, his unraveling, his desperation just to believe he'd ever cared at all—I understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, that I'd already lost everything worth keeping.
I reached into my bag, pulled out the folded petition, and smoothed it flat against the coffee table.
Tomorrow, I'd mail it.