I do not cry the day my marriage ends.
Not because I am brave. Not because I am numb. But because grief already bled me dry three months earlier, on the night I stood in my own bedroom doorway and realized the man I married had been rehearsing a new future in the bed I paid for.
By the time the divorce papers slide across the courthouse table, my tears are old currency, used up and worthless in ways I cannot recover. What remains inside me is something quieter and far more dangerous, something that no one in that room understands yet.
Clarity.
Graham signs first, all swagger and polished teeth, his pen scratching across the page like he is autographing a victory that he thinks belongs entirely to him. When he looks up at me, there is a grin on his face that belongs on a man who believes he just escaped a fire while carrying someone else’s gold in his hands.
