Chapter Ten
MOORE
Cormac negotiates with Carla Hutchins for three weeks before we reach the terms Aviance is willing to accept.
I want it on record — and I am aware no one requires my record on anything at this point, but I need to say it anyway — that I do not fight her on the marital assets.
Not the fifty percent she's entitled to under Tennessee equitable distribution, and not the dissipation claim on the funds I directed to Vanna.
I fight on the laptop, once, because Cormac tells me to let him try, but when Carla comes back with the paper trail of the joint account transaction and the timestamp matching the period of documented marital breakdown, I tell Cormac to stop.
"Just pay it," I say. "Pay everything."
"Moore, we might be able to—"
"Pay it," I say. "All of it. Whatever she's asking for."
The check for Aviance's portion of our joint assets clears on May 21st. The settlement agreement, including the dissipation reimbursement, is signed and submitted that same day.
The divorce will be finalized in approximately sixty days per Tennessee's waiting period, and then I will be, officially and permanently, a man who had something and didn't understand what he had until it was documented in forty-seven screenshots and four pages of deliberate handwriting on a nightstand.
I go back to work because there is nothing else to do.
The business is fine, will continue to be fine — financial planning is not a business that depends on your personal life being intact, and most of my clients are institutional contacts who either haven't followed the Twitter thread or don't connect my professional name to a piece of social-media drama.
The three-point-eight Google review situation stabilizes and then recovers slightly over the following weeks.
Vanna cleared out by the Friday I give her as the deadline.
She was escorted on a day when I am in a meeting, which is, I suspect, a courtesy from her HR contact.
She does not contact me after that. I hear from a mutual professional connection that she's found work at a different firm on the east side, and I feel nothing about this except a flat, exhausted relief.
There is a moment, about two weeks after Aviance left, when I go to couples therapy alone.
Not because I'm required to. Not because Dr. Brunner has asked me to.
I just call and make an appointment because I am sitting in our — in my apartment, at ten-thirty and I pick up my phone and I scroll through my contacts and the name that my thumb finds first, the person I most want to call and talk to about what I am feeling, is Aviance.
My wife. And I cannot call her. And I need to understand why it took losing her for her to be the first name I thought of.
Dr. Brunner doesn't moralize. He just asks questions.
"When did you start treating Vanna's calls as emergencies?" he asks.
I think about it. "October."
"What happened in October?"
"Aviance's birthday. Vanna called during dinner. I picked up." I pause. "Aviance didn't say anything. She just — looked at me. And I thought, I remember thinking: she understands. She's fine. Because she wasn't crying or angry or making a scene."
"Is Aviance someone who makes scenes?"
"No. Never. She's — she handles things. She processes internally."
"So you interpreted her silence as acceptance."
"Yeah."
"And from there, every time she didn't react visibly, you recalibrated upward? More availability for Vanna, less accountability to Aviance, because she seemed to be absorbing it?"
I close my eyes.
"I used her steadiness against her," I say. "I took the fact that she was strong and calm and didn't fall apart as permission to keep going."
Dr. Brunner lets that sit in the room.
"That," he says carefully, "is a very important thing to understand about yourself. It won't change what happened. But it's the right foundation for not repeating it."
I nod.
"She was keeping a folder," I say. "For three months. She was collecting the evidence of my choices, and she never showed it to me. She just — watched and documented and waited until she was ready to go."
"Does that make you angry?"
"No," I say, and I am surprised to find it's true. "No, it makes me — it makes me respect her. She didn't weaponize it. She didn't use it to control me or threaten me or manipulate me into staying. She left. She used it to leave cleanly."
Dr. Brunner makes a note.
"That's grief," he says. "What you're feeling. That's what grief for a marriage looks like. It doesn't always look like crying."
I sit with that.
Outside his window, Nashville is green and gold in late afternoon, and somewhere on the east side of the city, my wife is building something new without me.
I deserve exactly this.