Unfinished Business

Chapter One

AVIANCE

The playlist I made was called Sunday Slow.

I built it three weeks before our wedding, back when I was the kind of person who made playlists for specific moments — who believed that the right song playing in the right room could seal a feeling in amber.

Keep it forever. I don't know what I thought marriage was, exactly, at twenty-one.

Something solid. Something chosen, daily, like pulling on the same warm coat every morning because it fits you and you trust it.

I know better now. I know it in my bones.

It's a clear night in April and the Nashville skyline is a soft, distant glow through our bedroom curtains, and Moore is kissing the side of my neck the way he used to do before the word Vanna entered my vocabulary.

His hands are warm and his mouth is honest and for a few minutes — maybe ten, maybe fifteen — it feels like six months ago.

Like a year ago. Like the man I married is still in this room and not somewhere else entirely, hovering just outside the frame of our life like a ghost who forgot his own death.

We're in bed. His weight is over me and my fingers are in his hair, and the lamp is on its lowest setting and the sheets smell like the fabric softener I buy specifically because Moore used to say it smelled like something good.

Something clean. He told me that on our third date.

I've bought the same brand for three years.

"Aviance." He says my name against my collarbone and something in my chest cracks open the way it always does when he says it like that — like it matters, like I am the specific person he means — and I pull him closer because I want to believe that this, right here, can fix the last six months.

That bodies pressed together in the dark can close the distance that's been growing between us like a fault line, slow and grinding and inevitable.

I close my eyes.

His hand slides down my side and I breathe and I think: this is still ours. This is still real.

His phone buzzes on the nightstand.

I feel him tense. It's involuntary — a micromovement in his shoulders, a fractional stillness — and I have learned, in the past six months, to read that tension the way a sailor reads weather. The way prey reads a predator.

"Ignore it," I say.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, I will."

The phone buzzes again.

His rhythm doesn't falter and I exhale and I think: see. See, it's fine. He's here.

Then it rings.

The ringtone is the default. Just three notes, ascending.

I know, with a certainty that lives below thought, below language, below the conscious part of my brain entirely, who is calling.

I know because I have lived this moment eleven times in the past six months — not this exact moment, not always in bed, not always this intimate — but this exact shape of moment.

Moore here, fully here, and then the phone, and then the leaving.

He goes still.

"Moore," I say. My voice is completely flat. I don't mean it to be. It just comes out with all the emotion already pressed out of it, like a shirt ironed so many times the fabric has gone thin.

"One second," he says. He's already reaching. Already leaning toward the nightstand. "One second, let me just—"

He picks up.

I watch the ceiling.

"Vanna?" His voice shifts immediately. It becomes this careful, attentive thing, like a different instrument tuned to a different frequency, and I have tried, I have genuinely tried, to believe it means nothing.

That it is just professional concern. That I am not watching my husband become a different person in real time on top of me. "Hey, slow down, what's going on?"

I hear her voice through the phone — tinny, high-pitched, dramatic. I can't make out the words. I don't need to.

Moore sits up.

He is sitting up. He is physically removing himself from our bed, from my body, from the middle of the most basic act of intimacy that two married people can share, and he is sitting on the edge of the mattress with his phone pressed to his ear and his back to me.

"A mouse?" he says.

I close my eyes.

"Okay, okay — Vanna, it's fine. It's just a mouse, they can't — okay. Okay, I'll come. Give me ten minutes."

He ends the call.

The room is completely silent except for the playlist, which has moved on to a song I don't recognize, and the distant hum of traffic on the interstate.

"I have to go," Moore says. He is already standing. He is already pulling on the jeans he had kicked to the floor twenty minutes ago. "She's alone and she's terrified, she said—"

"She saw a mouse," I say.

"She has a phobia, Aviance. She called me crying."

"She called your cell phone. At ten forty-five at night. While you were—" I stop. I stop because my voice is threatening to do something I will not allow it to do in front of him. "You were with me, Moore."

"I know." He pulls a shirt on — inside out, I notice, and some small vicious part of me catalogs that, stores it. "I know, and I'm sorry, I'll be back in an hour. I just need to make sure she's okay and then I'll—"

"Go," I say.

Not because I'm releasing him. Because I am so far past releasing him that the word means something different now. Go as in: I see you. I see exactly what you're doing and exactly who you are and I am choosing, in this moment, to let you walk out this door so that I can think clearly.

He pauses in the doorway. He looks back at me and for one moment — just one — I see something shift in his face. Doubt, maybe. The beginning of recognition.

But then his phone buzzes with a text and he looks down at it, and the moment closes, and he leaves.

I lie in our bed for exactly seven minutes after I hear the front door shut.

Then I get up.

I have kept the folder for three months.

I want to be honest about that. I want to say plainly: I was not naive.

I saw the pattern long before tonight. I collected the evidence not out of cold calculation but out of the survival instinct of a woman who knew what she was watching and needed it to be real, needed it documented and dated and verifiable, because she knew that without proof she would gaslight herself into staying forever.

The folder is in the back of the closet, inside a shoebox, inside a tote bag from a bookstore I visited on my honeymoon.

I take it out and I sit on the floor of the closet with my legs crossed and a flashlight from my phone and I go through it one last time.

Forty-seven screenshots. Printed in color, organized chronologically, with handwritten dates in the margins.

The first ones are almost funny, if you can access that register.

Oct 14th: Moore leaves Aviance's birthday dinner early to help Vanna with a "computer emergency.

" That's what Vanna posted, word for word, on her Instagram story.

Girl I called my boss in the middle of his wife's birthday dinner and he LEFT to help me figure out my laptop lol he is literally the most dedicated person I have ever worked for

Twenty-three likes. Two comments: goals and that's so sweet!

I wasn't following Vanna's Instagram. My friend Petra was, after I mentioned to the group chat that something felt off about Moore's new hire. Petra was the one who started screenshotting. Petra, who has worked in HR for two years and has, as she put it, a finely calibrated bullshit detector.

I flip through the pages.

Nov 2nd: Moore cancels date night to drive Vanna to the ER for what turned out to be a minor allergic reaction to her face wash.

Vanna's Twitter: tw // health: had the scariest night but my boss dropped EVERYTHING to make sure I was okay.

I don't deserve him and his wife should know that.

Forty-one retweets. She deleted it three days later. Petra had already saved it.

Dec 19th: Moore misses the first half of Aviance's work holiday party to help Vanna pack for a solo holiday trip. Vanna's Instagram: The way he showed up with boxes and bubble wrap at 8pm on a Friday. Moore Cox you are a real one. Tell your wife she's lucky.

Tell your wife she's lucky.

I read that one four times when Petra first sent it to me. I sat at my desk at the design firm where I work — worked, present tense, still — and I read it four times and felt something in my chest turn from warm to cold to nothing at all.

I flip further.

Jan 31st: Moore leaves couples therapy session early to call Vanna, who is "upset about something at work." I added this one myself. I wrote the date and the time on a piece of paper and slipped it in the folder that same night, sitting in the parking lot of our therapist's office.

We had been in couples therapy for three months at that point.

Moore thought it was helping. He told Dr. Brunner that he and I were communicating better, that he was "working on the balance," that Vanna was "just an employee" and I was being "understandably insecure.

" I sat three feet away from him on a gray corduroy couch and I thought about the folder.

I keep going.

Feb 14th: Valentine's Day. Moore takes a three-hour detour on the way home to help Vanna deal with a "pipe issue" in her apartment.

He arrived home at nine p.m. with cold takeout and a card he'd clearly signed in the car.

Vanna's TikTok that night: Asked my boss for help with a leak and he came on Valentine's Day, his wife is calling him right now and he's still here helping me. This man. We don't deserve him.

Seventy-two thousand views.

She wasn't always this public about it. She escalated.

Looking at the folder chronologically, I can trace the arc of her confidence — the way her posts got more specific, more flagrant, more deliberate.

The earlier ones could, if you squinted, read as innocent gratitude.

The later ones read as something else. Like she was performing for an audience.

Like Moore's repeated arrival at her door was a trophy she was polishing for display.

The last screenshot in the folder is from four days ago.

It is a subtweet from Vanna's account, which she has since set to private but which she did not think to set to private before Petra screenshotted it: Some of you are wondering what it's like to have a man who actually prioritizes you.

I'd tell you but I don't think your situation will ever compare Forty-nine retweets. Three hundred and twelve likes.

I close the folder.

I take off my wedding ring. Then my engagement ring — the one Moore put on my finger on a beautiful morning in the kitchen because he said he couldn't wait any longer, and I had cried and said yes and believed every single word of it.

I set them on the nightstand, side by side, like two periods at the end of a sentence.

I write the note by hand. Four pages. I go through the folder, event by event, and I list each date and each incident and each corresponding screenshot number and I write it all down in my cleanest handwriting, the handwriting I use when I want something to be read carefully and remembered permanently. At the bottom of page four, I write:

I am filing for divorce. I will be seeking half of all marital assets as provided by Tennessee law.

I will also be seeking reimbursement or return of any marital assets — money, gifts, property — that you directed to Vanna Moireland during our marriage.

My attorney will be in contact within the week.

I hope you find what you were looking for. I know I will.

I sign it with my first name only.

I pack a bag. Not everything — not yet, not tonight. Just enough for now.

I take the folder.

I take the rings as evidence. I photograph them on the nightstand beside the note before I leave, timestamp on the photo.

I text Petra: Can I come over?

She responds in thirty seconds: Door's unlocked. I'll put the kettle on.

I walk out of our apartment without looking back, and I do not cry once, not even in the elevator, not even in the parking lot, not even on the highway with Nashville's lights smearing gold and amber through the windshield.

I save the crying for Petra's couch, forty minutes later, when the kettle is boiling and someone who loves me is sitting close enough to touch.

Then I cry for a long time.

Then I stop.

Then I open my laptop and I call the divorce attorney Petra's older sister recommended eight months ago, the one I have had saved in my contacts since January under the name Dr. Reeves so Moore would never notice.

Her name is Carla Hutchins. She picks up on the second ring.

"Ms. Cox," she says, and her voice is steady and matter-of-fact and exactly what I need. "I've been expecting your call. Tell me everything."