By the second week, she'd stopped checking whether he'd tried to contact her. The blocked number, the blocked email, the returned flowers. They'd created a perimeter, and inside it she was beginning to breathe again. Her lungs remembered how to expand fully, without the bodice of a dress or the constriction of trying to be someone she wasn't.
She went back to school on Monday. She'd taken a week off — "family emergency," the principal had said to the substitute, and Charlotte was grateful for the vagueness. Her fourth graders swarmed her when she walked in. Tiny arms around her waist, voices overlapping:Miss Hoffman, you're back! We missed you! Are you okay? Tommy said you went to space but I said that was dumb.
She knelt down and hugged as many of them as she could reach and thought:This is mine. This was always mine.
Oliver, the boy with the dragons, the one whose mother was sick, had left a drawing on her desk. A dragon with a crown, breathing not fire but flowers. Underneath, in careful handwriting:For Miss Hoffman because she is the best.Charlotte pressed the drawing to her chest, excused herself to the supply closet and cried for two minutes with the door closed. And then she washed her face in the faculty bathroom and went back to teach fractions.
She was good at this. She'd always been good at this. Somewhere in the fog of Dominic Weston, she'd forgotten that her life before him had been full.Hers. Her classroom with itsbulletin boards and reading corner. Her students who drew her pictures, told her secrets and thought she'd hung the moon. Her Friday nights with Kate, grading papers, drinking cheap wine and arguing about whetherPride and Prejudicewas a romance or a social satire. Her morning runs through the neighborhood, earbuds in, no destination, just moving.
She'd set all of it aside when Dominic appeared. He hadn’t asked her to, or maybe he had, in ways so subtle she hadn't recognized them as requests. The dinners that always fell on the nights she'd planned to see friends. The weekends at the Hamptons house that replaced her Saturday morning runs. The gradual, imperceptible shrinking of her world to fit inside his, until she was living in his apartment, wearing clothes his mother approved of and practicing fork placement from YouTube tutorials she'd never told him about.
She was done shrinking.
Three weeks after the wedding, she signed a lease on a studio apartment in Sunnyside. Third floor of a prewar building with wide windows, a radiator that clanked and a kitchen so narrow she could touch both walls at the same time. It was what she could afford on a teacher's salary. It was hers.
Kate helped her move in. There wasn't much to move: her clothes, her books, a box of teaching supplies, the quilt her mother had made when she was twelve. Her things at the apartment she’d shared with Dominic had been sparse; he’d had the decency to have them sent to Kate’s, along with another letter she didn’t read. And she’d sent her ring back to him, swallowing against the lump in her throat.
The furniture was secondhand: a bed frame from Facebook Marketplace, a bookshelf from a stoop sale in Woodside, a kitchen table with a wobble she fixed with a folded napkin.
She and Kate painted the bedroom on a Saturday afternoon. Sage green, a color Charlotte had loved for years and never usedbecause Dominic's apartment was all gray, white and chrome. She hadn't wanted to suggest anything that didn't match. Kate got paint in her hair, Charlotte got paint on her jeans. They ordered pizza and sat on the floor eating it while the walls dried.
"This color is perfect," Kate said, tilting her head at the green.
"Yeah," Charlotte said. "It is."
That night, alone in her new apartment, Charlotte lay in her secondhand bed under her mother's quilt. She listened to the radiator clank, the traffic outside and a neighbor playing music through the wall. It was something slow, with horns. The ceiling had a crack that ran from the window to the light fixture, jagged and branching, like a river on a map.
She wasn't happy. That would come later, or it wouldn't. But she was here, in a space she'd chosen, in a life she was rebuilding with her own hands. No one had picked this apartment for her. No one had approved the paint color or arranged the furniture or sent a car to take her where they wanted her to go.
Charlotte rolled over, pressed her face into the pillow and let herself miss him. One minute. She gave herself one minute to feel the absence: the warmth of his body, the sound of his breathing, how his arm used to drape across her waist in sleep, heavy and unconscious and close. One minute for the version of him she'd loved, or almost loved, or convinced herself she loved because the alternative was admitting that she'd given her heart to someone who'd held it like a business card.
The minute passed. She opened her eyes.
She got up, plugged in her phone, set her alarm for six a.m., and went back to bed. In the morning she'd run. After that, she'd teach. After that, she'd come home to her sage walls, her clanking radiator and her life, which was ordinary, absent of Dominic, yet entirely, stubbornly hers.
CHAPTER 8
DOMINIC
The vows lived in Dominic’s desk drawer.
Top right, beneath a stack of contracts he hadn't looked at in weeks. Charlotte's folded paper, blue ink, smudged at the corners where she'd cried on it while writing. He'd carried it in his jacket pocket for a month after the wedding before transferring it to the drawer, where it sat like a letter he kept meaning to answer and couldn't.
He opened the drawer now. Unfolded the paper. He'd read it dozens of times — enough that the creases were going soft, the folds threatening to separate — and every time he found something new. In himself. In what he heard when he read them.
I didn't grow up in your world.
He'd heard that line at the altar and thought:charming.A nice contrast. The schoolteacher and the executive. It played well, it read well, it was part of why she was suitable.
He read it now and heard what she'd actually been saying:I’m telling you who I am. I’m asking you to see me. I’m standing in front of you, and I’m handing you the truest version of myself and hoping it's enough.
It had been enough. It had been more than enough. He just hadn't been paying attention.
I choose you, Dominic. Today and tomorrow and every day I'm lucky enough to get.
He folded the paper along its worn creases, put it back in the drawer. He stared at the skyline through floor-to-ceiling windows of his office.
Six months. Charlotte had been gone for six months, and the city looked different without her in it. He kept finding her in gaps and absences. The coffee mug she'd brought from her apartment, yellow, chipped at the handle, the wordTEACHprinted on the side, was gone from the kitchen cabinet. The throw pillows she'd picked for the couch were gone. The faint scent of her shampoo in the bathroom had faded weeks ago, but he still caught himself inhaling when he opened the shower door, searching for a trace that wasn't there.
