Chapter Fourteen
MOORE
The apartment I'm renting has beige carpet and a bathroom faucet that drips every eleven seconds. I've counted.
The house is still technically mine — we haven't finalized — but I can't sleep in it.
Every room in that house is an argument I lost. Every piece of furniture we picked together is a photograph of a version of me that I would like to believe is not the only version that has ever existed, but the evidence is — as Aviance so thoroughly documented — against me.
I go to Dr. Brunner twice a week now.
He has a habit of asking simple questions that take me forty minutes to answer. Last week: What do you think she needed from you?
I thought about it. "To show up," I said. "To make her feel like she was the — the default. Like she was the person I thought of first."
"And was she?"
I didn't answer for a while.
"No," I said, finally. "Toward the end, she wasn't. Vanna was — Vanna made demands.
Loud, constant, urgent-feeling demands, and I ran toward them because there's something in me that needs to feel needed, and Aviance didn't perform needing me the way Vanna did.
Aviance just — was. She was there. She was consistent and solid and—"
"And that felt like safety," Dr. Brunner said.
"Yes."
"And so you took it for granted."
Yes.
I took it for granted because it didn't make noise. And I chased the noise because the noise told me I mattered.
Carla Hutchins has filed the motion for dissipation of marital assets.
Cormac sent me the breakdown and I sat with it for a long time — the hotel stays, the dinners on the joint card, the jacket I bought Vanna because she mentioned the weather.
Small things that built into a number that is not small.
I authorize the transfer.
Not because Cormac told me to. Because it's the right settlement and because Aviance is owed it and because the only thing I have left to give her, at this point, is the honest acknowledgment that what I spent was hers as much as mine and she has every right to it.
Vanna was let go from the company before Aviance filed.
Dane did it, my business partner, because the screenshots Aviance posted made our firm look complicit in the kind of behavior that loses you clients.
Vanna didn't go quietly — there were two emails, increasingly intemperate — but they went nowhere because the documentation was not in her favor.
I don't speak to her.
I mean that both actively and passively — I've removed her contact information and I've instructed her through Cormac not to contact me.
She sent one long message through a mutual connection that I read once and then deleted.
I remember the tone of it more than the content: aggrieved, defensive, full of language about how she'd done nothing wrong and I'd been the one to come to her.
That last part is, unfortunately, true.
She didn't drag me out of my marriage. She made herself available to be chosen and I chose her, over and over and over, at the direct expense of my wife.
I own that.
It is the sharpest thing I have ever held.