I leaned forward until our foreheads nearly touched, breath meeting breath.
“You walk into that café,” I said. “You say everything you need to say. You hand him the article. You give him the divorce papers. And by the time you walk out, Penn…” My thumb brushed her chin. “Your future will already be printing.”
She smiled. Small. Trembling. Like sunrise breaking through a storm.
And somewhere across the city, newsstands were already being stocked with her truth. Her voice. Her reckoning.
The world was about to meet the woman I’d been waiting for my entire damn life.
I send the message with hands that do not feel like mine. A message from the dating app not my personal number.
They hover first. Thumbs stalled above the screen like they’re waiting for permission from a body that has already given up trying to protect me.
I just want a day where it feels like I’m not falling apart anymore, Café 10 twenty minutes.
I read it once.
Twice.
Three times.
It sounds smaller than the truth. Kinder. Like I’m asking for rest instead of air. Like I’m not already drowning.
I press send anyway.
The words leave my phone and float somewhere between mercy and execution.
I set the phone face down on the desk and immediately regret it. The absence burns worse than the presence ever could. Every second stretches, elastic and cruel. I can hear the building breathing around me. Elevators sighing. Footsteps echoing. Carrie’s voice faint through glass and distance, commanding a room the way I once dreamed I might.
Blake’s response comes hours later.
I know before I flip the phone over. My body always knows first. A tightening low in my gut. That familiar hollowing behind my ribs.
Okay.
One syllable.
Clipped.
Bloodless.
A door left ajar. Enough to walk through. Enough to bleed.
I don’t reply.
Carrie is in her office summing all her people to get all things done, the glass tower humming, the article being typeset and sharpened and dressed for the world. Headlines forming like weather systems. Proofs sliding into place. The presses warming their lungs, ready to exhale my truth into the city.
I stand in my office for a moment before I leave.
Not sitting. Not pacing. Just suspended between heartbeats.
The room smells like old wood and fresh ink. Antique bookshelves lining one wall, their spines cracked and loved. A desk by the window that looks out over the city, sunlight pooling where I once imagined myself writing something that mattered.
I open the drawer.
Divorce papers.
Signed.
