Penn
The envelope stares back at me like it knows what it’s about to do.
Thin. Innocent. Lethal.
The kind of thing that could sit untouched on a desk all day and still change your entire life once you tear it open.
I stare at my name,Penn-Rose Catertyped neatly across the front, like it belongs to someone else. Someone capable. Composed. Not the woman sitting here with shaking hands and a heart that’s lost the will to keep pretending.
The world hums on around me. Keyboards. Coffee machines. Laughter that sounds more like static. And I just sit there, staring at a piece of paper that might be the final nail in something I didn’t know how to stop grieving.
Blake.
The name still tastes like salt and smoke. Like the first boy who made me feel infinite and the last man who made me feel invisible.
For a second, I think about not opening it.
Just sliding it into a drawer and pretending I never saw it.
But that’s not how ghosts work.
They linger until you face them.
So, I tear it open. The rip is too loud. Too final. And there it is. His signature strong, arrogant, unapologetic at the bottom of a document that reduces a decade of love, betrayal, and hope to legal paragraphs and cold ink.
Petition for Dissolution of Marriage.
My stomach turns. I don’t cry. Not yet.
Instead, the room goes sharp. Bright. Every sound amplified the click of a pen, the sigh of the air conditioner, the hum of the lights like a swarm of bees. I can’t breathe. It’s like the paper sucked all the oxygen from the room. I slide from the office chair and crawl into the darkness under my desk pulling my knees up around me and cradle them like a small child.
“Penn.”
I hear Carrie’s voice before I see her. She slips in quietly, drawn by the sound of my sobs, she always knows where to find me when I’m breaking. Panic and pain don’t wear new faces on me. They’re always the same mask.
“What did he do this time?” Carrie’s voice cuts through the static, low and careful, as she pries the crumpled napkin from my fists.
My knuckles are bloodless white, locked tight, trembling. The papers on my desk blur in and out of focus divorce documents, legal, clinical, final. But it’s the napkin that kills me.
Folded. Creased. His handwriting crawling across it like a ghost that still knows how to wound.
A single question. A request, written in ink that smudges where my tears fell,Can we move Gracie?To the seaside cemetery he and his mother found. Like it’s a matter of logistics. Like she’s luggage. Like it’s easy.
I can’t speak. I can’t even breathe.
Carrie reads in silence. Her eyes track line by brutal line, her expression shifting concern first, then disbelief, then something closer to rage. Her fingers tighten around the napkin, and her jaw trembles.
When her gaze lifts to me, it’s wet. Furious. Heartbroken.
She looks from the words to my face. Back again. Over and over. As if she’s trying to make sense of how someone could love you once, build a life with you, and still cut this deep.
And then she cries. Not loud. Not dramatic. But the quiet kind the kind that guts you wordlessly, because it means she feels it too.
I don’t move. I just sit there in the wreckage glass walls closing in, the city a blur beyond them. And I swear I can feel myself bleeding out right there on the floor of my office not from a wound you can see, but from the kind that never really stops.
“He didn’t”
“He did.”
