After
AFTER
On a gray morning in November, a week before I leave for Greece, I think about Michael without hurting.
I’m at my desk in the living room, penning a medical article—my practical side has decided not to quit until this travel job starts paying the bills—when my mind drifts. I gaze past my computer, recalling the time Michael sneaked up and laid an open-mouthed kiss against my neck. We’d fought about Paris earlier. I wanted to go; he didn’t. He’d spent an hour holed up in his office, then came downstairs and apologized with his hands, his tongue. He’d bent me over the desk and confessed his regrets the same way he always did. I’d cried out and arched against him and asked for more. And he’d given it. He’d always given me that.
Rain trickles down the windowpanes. Rivulets seem to collect in my mind, reflecting truths I’ve never bothered to look at too closely.
Michael and I had off-the-charts sexual chemistry—we really did—from the very first moment he tossed me onto our kitchen island in Seattle and lost himself in me. But neither of us ever learned what the other really needed. How to truly connect.
Now I roll my chair back. Michael’s office seems to whisper, luring me toward the stairs. My footfalls echo, a drumbeat leading me onward.
Upstairs, I push the door wide.
Cold silence lies thick in the office. Clippings carpet the floor. I gather up the divorce papers first, pausing on the page stained by my husband’s signature.
Now that I’m looking at them up close, the letters look shaky. Smaller than Michael’s usual. I trace the loops of ink and wonder, for the first time, if maybe he signed these not out of cruelty, but guilt. Could he possibly have understood what I’m only just now discovering?
That we were never right for each other? That we were living half a life? That despite all he stole from me—fourteen years, the life I always wanted—I was never truly his, at least not in the way I believed?
A thought occurs to me, and I check the date beside his signature—seven months before he died.
Sure enough, when I dig into the filing cabinet for his medical records, I come up with a biopsy report dated three days later. Which means Michael signed these during that week he thought he had cancer.
I squeeze my eyes shut and hug the papers to my chest. The best I can figure is that in the beginning, he kept me for himself, not only as an accountability partner in his battle with alcohol, but as some kind of trophy—tangible proof of his triumph over the man who’d overshadowed him and, in his mind, taken Lily. Eventually, Michael came to care for me, but deep down, he knew he’d done wrong. He never would’ve signed these if he hadn’t.
With a held breath, I set the papers aside and gather the magazine clippings.
They look so different this time. Grayson appears no less tormented, but now I see myself in the shadows behind his eyes and the lines around his mouth. I see a man for whom grief and love are the same thing.
I take the stack downstairs and set it beside the lit lantern. The topmost picture shows Grayson on that yacht, shirtless and scowling, one hand splayed over his chest as if to keep my name safely against his skin.
My name , branded on his heart.
My throat thickens. I find my phone on the desk and open my contacts list. I saved his number that night in Millbrook, after he unblocked himself. I click the message icon.
I miss you , I type. Still. Always.
My thumb hovers over the send button. I go over the message twenty times.
The words are true. The deepest, most terrifying ones I have inside me. But another set of words runs through my mind, too—the last ones Grayson spoke to me at the cabin.
I need to figure out who I am without you. Because right now, I have no idea .
In the end, I hit Delete, then go upstairs to get my passport.