Max didn’t apologize.
He shrugged.
“Well, what did you expect?” he said. “Men are visual. And Claire… she’s perfect.”
I remember standing in our bedroom while he packed a suitcase. I remember the specific shirt he was folding, a blue button-down I had bought him for our tenth anniversary. I remember thinking how strange it was that he folded it so neatly, as if it mattered.
“You cheated on me,” I said slowly, “because I gained weight?”
“You used to have a slim waist, Ronnie.”
He smoothed the collar and laid the shirt in the suitcase.
“When was the last time you even looked at yourself in the mirror?”
He said it like a genuine question. Like he was trying to help.
That sentence followed me through the whole divorce.
I looked in the mirror constantly after that. I checked my stomach every morning while I got dressed. I turned sideways before I left the house, sucking in, letting go, sucking in again. I changed shirts three times because I could hear Max saying my arms looked better covered. I stopped wearing the yellow sundress I loved because he’d once said it made me “look wide.” I stopped eating dessert in front of anyone. I stopped being in photos.
It’s a strange thing, losing a husband and gaining a voice in your head that sounds exactly like him.
The divorce was finalized in the spring. Max moved into a sleek apartment downtown, and within months, Claire’s things were in it. Lily came home from her first weekend there and told me Claire made smoothies “with spinach in them, Mom, it was disgusting,” and I laughed harder than I had in weeks.
Then, in late summer, Max announced he was marrying Claire.
And sent me that text.
Part Three: The Favor
I could have skipped the wedding. Believe me, I thought about it. I drafted at least four replies telling Max exactly where he could put his invitation.
But our daughters would be there. Lily was going to be a junior bridesmaid, which Claire had arranged without asking me, and June was going to toss flower petals, which she had been practicing in our living room with shredded tissue paper for a week. And Lily had already asked me twice, very carefully, if I was coming.
“You don’t have to,” she said the second time, looking at her shoes. “But it would be nice.”
So I said yes.
Then I sat at my kitchen table and stared at that +1.
We both know you don’t have anyone.
I knew it was petty. I knew it was exactly the kind of game I should be above. But I wanted Max to look across that room and see that I was fine. Better than fine. That I hadn’t fallen apart without him. That somebody, anybody, could look at me and see something worth choosing.
Which is how I ended up standing next to Edward’s desk on Monday morning, holding two coffees and feeling like a teenager about to ask someone to prom.
