15. Theo
THEO
I walked the old neighborhood without deciding to.
I hadn't slept more than four hours since she left.
Ten days since Lena had walked out of her sister's house and left me standing on the porch with a question I couldn't answer.
One week since Marcus had backed me into a corner with questions of his own until I'd said it out loud: I wasn't there.
I'd stopped sitting down with her. I'd stopped seeing her.
The streets here were narrower than the ones my name owned.
Cracked sidewalks, storefront windows papered over with permits and auction notices, paint peeling off brick in long curled strips.
A bodega on the corner still sold cigarettes one at a time and lottery tickets to people who couldn't afford either.
I'd driven past this block a hundred times on the way to somewhere else and never stopped.
Never had a reason to. Today I'd parked three streets over and walked, my hands shoved deep in my jacket pockets, the wind cutting through the fabric like I wasn't wearing anything at all.
I didn't know why I'd come here. Instinct, maybe. The same pull that made you go back to a place that mattered once, before you knew better.
I saw her half a block ahead.
She walked the same direction I was going, her pace steady and deliberate, her coat pulled close against the wind.
I knew the shape of her before I registered anything else.
Twelve years of watching her move through rooms, through kitchens, through our home, and my body still recognized hers before my mind caught up.
The way she held herself. The line of her shoulders.
The tilt of her head when she was thinking about something she wouldn't say out loud.
She didn't turn around. Didn't slow. Didn't know I was there.
I stopped walking.
Found a storefront window and stood in front of it like I had business there. Power tools on dusty shelves, price tags faded to nothing, a fluorescent light flickering somewhere in back. I stared at a cordless drill I didn't need and had no reason to want, and I waited.
She kept walking. Turned the corner at the end of the block and disappeared.
I counted to thirty before I moved again.
Giving her space was the only thing I knew how to give her anymore.
She'd asked me what she missed more than anything else, and I'd stood there on her sister's porch with my mouth open and no answer.
I'd had twelve years to learn my own wife, and I didn't know.
Marcus had taken me apart in his office a week later and walked me right up to the edge of it, question after question, until I'd finally seen what I'd done.
I'd left her. Not with another woman. Not for another life.
I'd just stopped being there, stopped sitting down, stopped seeing her at all.
That much I knew now.
But I still didn't know what she missed. And standing outside that storefront with a drill I'd never buy, I felt the weight of it like something I'd been carrying so long I'd stopped noticing until someone made me set it down.
I started walking again.
The diner sat at the end of the block like a grave nobody visited.
Plywood covered the windows, nailed in crooked and weathered grey.
The door hung on one hinge, the bottom corner dragging against the concrete, a gap wide enough to see darkness inside.
Ten years of rain and neglect had stripped the paint down to bare wood, and someone had spray-painted a tag across the front in red and black that I couldn't read and didn't want to.
The sign was gone. Just the rusted brackets where it used to hang, bolts still screwed into the brick.
I stood on the sidewalk and looked at it.
This was the place. The one Lena and I used to come to after our shifts ended, back when I was a line cook in her family's restaurant and she ran the dining room.
We'd sit here until they kicked us out and plan things we hadn't earned yet.
My first restaurant. The menu, the plating, the way we'd run the kitchen and the front of house like partners instead of separate worlds.
She'd written half of it down on paper she'd stolen from her father's office, and I'd sketched the layout on napkins like we knew what we were doing.
We didn't. But we did it anyway.
The diner had been nothing special even then.
A place that served food nobody ordered twice, where the coffee tasted burnt and the toast came out worse.
But it stayed open late, and the owner didn't care if you sat for three hours over one plate, and Lena had laughed at something I'd said once and I'd decided it was the best place in the world.
Now it was a wreck. Ruined and abandoned, left to rot in a neighborhood nobody with money cared about anymore.
I crossed the street and stopped in front of the door.
The wood was soft under my hand when I touched it.
Rotted through in places, splintered in others, the grain gone grey and lifeless.
The handle was missing. Just a hole where it used to be, the edges worn smooth by years and weather.
I pulled the door open and it scraped across the concrete, the sound loud and wrong in the quiet.
Inside was worse.
Tables overturned, chairs stacked in a corner and covered in dust thick enough to write in.
The floor tiles were cracked, some of them missing entirely, black mould crawling up the walls where water had gotten in and never dried.
The counter was still there, but the surface had warped and split, and the stools were gone.
The kitchen door hung open in back, darkness pooled beyond it like something waiting.
I stepped inside and let the door scrape shut behind me.
The smell hit me first. Mildew and rot and old grease baked into surfaces nobody had cleaned in a decade. The air was cold, damp, the kind that got into your lungs and stayed there. I walked to the centre of the room and stood still, just looking.
This was the place Lena had sat across from me and stolen food off my plate.
The place she'd argued with me about portion sizes like we were running a restaurant already, like it was real and not just two kids with no money and too much ambition.
The place she'd leaned forward with her elbows on the table and told me I was wrong about plating, and then sketched it out on a napkin to prove it.
I didn't remember when I'd stopped listening to her like that. When I'd stopped asking what she thought before I made a decision. When her opinion had gone from the first thing I needed to something I didn't think about at all.
Somewhere between the first restaurant and the tenth. Between the first television contract and the fiftieth city. Between the first time I told her I'd be home and wasn't, and the thousandth.
I reached into my jacket and pulled out the folded paper I'd been carrying since the morning after I found it.
The hand-written menu. The one she'd made for my first restaurant, back when we still used "we" and "ours" and meant it.
I'd found it in the house after she'd left, lying on top of the dresser in our bedroom where she'd set it down.
She'd left it there deliberately. Left it where I'd find it, the same way she'd left her ring.
Things that used to mean something, placed where I couldn't miss them.
I unfolded it carefully. Her handwriting from twelve years ago looked back at me, younger and rounder than the hand she wrote with now, the letters careful and even, the categories in capitals underlined twice.
The dishes we'd dreamed up together, the ones we'd talked about when we planned my first restaurant.
Some of them were what I'd actually opened with.
I recognised my own beginning in it, in the careful way she'd written out each one under its heading, in the fork and knife she'd sketched in the corner like we knew what we were doing.
The paper was worn soft at the edges, creased down the middle from being folded so long, and there was a faint coffee stain in one corner from that night at our kitchen table, drinking cheap coffee and dreaming about what we'd make together.
I folded the paper again and put it back in my pocket.
The marriage had started here. Not legally.
Not officially. But the real one. The one where Lena sat across from me and we built something together, where I listened when she talked and she trusted me to hear it.
That marriage had started in this room, at one of these tables, over food nobody should've eaten and plans we'd somehow made real.
And then I'd buried it. Plate by plate, kitchen by kitchen, city by city, until there was nothing left but her eating alone and me tasting standing up because I didn't have time to sit down.
Marcus had been right. Money was what ruined the marriage. Money, and everything I'd done to get it. The show, the empire, the restaurants with my name on the door and her name nowhere.
I'd known that for a week now. Known I'd neglected her, that I'd stopped being there, that I'd let everything else come first.
But standing in this wreck of a building, I felt something else. Not the answer. Not yet. Just the shape of it, the way you know a room is there in the dark before you find the wall.
This was where it started. Before the money. Before the cameras. Before my name meant anything to anyone but her. This was the place where Lena sat across from me and we made something together.
I didn't know what she missed. But whatever it was, it lived here. In this building. In whatever we used to be before I let the rest of it bury us.
I looked at the ruined counter, the overturned tables, the cracked tiles and the rot climbing the walls. The diner was a wreck. But the bones were still there. The space. The kitchen in back. The layout. The shape of the room.
I could fix this.
Not with money. Not with a check and a contractor and a crew I'd never meet. With my hands. The same hands that had built the first restaurant, back when I didn't have anything but the work and Lena sitting across from me telling me when I got it wrong.
I didn't know if it would matter. Didn't know if she'd ever see it, or if she'd care if she did.
But I knew one thing Marcus had made me see: I couldn't buy my way back to her.
Money was the problem. Money was what had taken me away from the table, from the chair across from hers, from the marriage.
This was different. This was the work. The kind I used to do before I hired people to do it for me.
I pulled out my phone to check the time, and it rang in my hand.
My lawyer's name on the screen. I answered.
"Mr. Marchand." His voice was careful, professional, the tone he used when he had news I wouldn't like. "I'm calling to inform you that Mrs. Marchand's attorney has filed the petition to dissolve the marriage. The divorce is moving forward."
I didn't say anything. Just stood in the middle of the ruined diner and stared at a table lying on its side, one leg snapped clean off.
"Sir?" he said. "Are you there?"
"I'm here."
"Do you want me to contest the filing?" he asked. "We can submit a response, delay the process, negotiate terms. If you'd like to propose a settlement?—"
"No," I said.
Silence on the other end. Then: "I'm sorry, did you say no?"
"Don't contest it," I said. "Don't delay it. Let it go through."
"Mr. Marchand." His voice shifted, became something closer to actual concern. "I have to advise you that if we don't respond, the court will proceed with Mrs. Marchand's terms. You'll have no input on the settlement, the division of assets?—"
"I don't care about the assets," I said. "Let her have whatever she wants."
Another pause. Longer this time. "Are you certain? Once the petition moves forward without a response?—"
"I'm certain."
"All right." He didn't sound convinced, but he knew better than to argue. "I'll inform her counsel that we won't be contesting. The court will schedule a hearing, likely within sixty days."
"Fine."
"Is there anything else you'd like me to?—"
I ended the call and shoved the phone back in my pocket.
The divorce was going ahead. Lena was done with me. She'd taken off her ring and set it down on a table in my world, walked out of our home, asked me a question I couldn't answer, and now she was making it legal. Sixty days, maybe less, and the marriage would be over. Not just broken. Finished.
I looked around the diner again.
I was going to do this anyway.
Not to stop the divorce. I wasn't going to fight her on that. If she wanted it done, it would be done. I wouldn't stand in her way, wouldn't make her battle me in court, wouldn't turn this into something uglier than I'd already made it.
And not to win her back. I didn't know if that was even possible anymore.
She'd looked at me on her sister's porch and asked what she missed, and I'd had nothing.
She'd walked away from twelve years like it didn't matter, and maybe it didn't. Maybe I'd killed it too thoroughly for anything to grow back.
But I was going to do this because it was the only thing I had left that wasn't money or cameras or my name on a door.
I was going to be the man she fell in love with. The one who worked with his hands. The one who built things instead of buying them. The one who sat across from her at a table in a diner nobody cared about and made plans like they mattered.
Even if she never saw it. Even if she never came back. Even if the divorce went through and she moved on and forgot I existed.
I pulled an overturned chair toward me and set it upright. The seat was cracked, the vinyl split and peeling, stuffing coming out in clumps. I set it aside and reached for another one.
The work would take months. Maybe longer. I didn't care.
I had nothing but time now.