Chapter 9 - The Quiet After
The annulment took eleven weeks.
My lawyer was a brisk woman named Marlene Fisk who wore the same pearl studs to every meeting and never used a word more than she needed. She told me it was moving fast.
"Fraud cases can drag for a year," she said at our second meeting. "He's cooperating. That helps."
"He said he would."
"Men say that a lot." She signed something and slid it across the desk. "He's actually doing it. That's the rare part."
I signed where she pointed.
Wade and I spoke twice more over those eleven weeks. Both times short. Both times about paperwork. He never tried to talk me out of it. He never asked to meet in person. He answered the question, said goodbye, and hung up.
The last document got signed on a Tuesday in March. Marlene called me at two-thirty.
"It's done," she said. "As of today, legally, the marriage is treated like it never happened."
I was standing in the parking lot outside the grocery store when she called, a bag in one hand. Bread, milk, the good coffee Erin likes, a bar of dark chocolate because it had been that kind of week.
"Thank you, Marlene."
"Take care of yourself," she said, which was the most personal thing she'd said to me in eleven weeks.
I stood in the lot a minute after we hung up. Gray sky. A woman rolled a cart past me. A kid in a red coat took off running ahead of his dad and got scooped up and swung around, shrieking with laughter.
I put the groceries in the car and drove home.
Erin was at the kitchen table when I came in, working on a college application she'd put on hold while our lives came apart. She looked up at the sound of the door.
"How'd it go?"
"It's done."
She set her pen down. "Done done?"
"Done done."
She got up, crossed the kitchen, and hugged me. A real one, both arms, the kind she used to give me when she was little and had just woken up from a nightmare.
"Okay," she said into my shoulder. "Okay."
I held on a second. Then I pulled back and held up the bag. "I got your coffee."
She laughed. A real laugh — sudden, no guard on it — and it was the best sound I'd heard in months.
We made dinner together that night. Nothing fancy. Pasta, a simple sauce, the good bread torn straight off the loaf and eaten off the cutting board.
We talked about her application, about the school she was most excited about, about whether she wanted to stay close to home or go far.
"I've been thinking about Boulder," she said.
"That's far."
"I know." She wound pasta around her fork. "But I think I need somewhere new. Somewhere that's just mine."
"Then Boulder," I said.
She looked at me. "You're okay with that?"
"I'm not okay with it," I said honestly. "But I think it's right. Both of those can be true at the same time."
She smiled, and it reached her eyes.
After dinner I washed and she dried, the way we used to when she was in high school and we had a routine and the world was smaller and easier to hold.
The radio was on low. Something old, something with a piano in it.
When the last dish was in the rack, Erin folded the towel over the oven handle.
"Mom?"
"Mm."
"I'm glad it's like this. Just us."
I looked around the kitchen. The wiped counter. Two mugs drying on the rack. The grocery bag folded and tucked next to the trash can. Everything where it went.
"So am I," I said.
I turned off the kitchen light. We went up the stairs together, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, I fell asleep before midnight — not because I was worn out, but because there was nothing left to lie awake dreading.
The house was quiet. The rain had stopped. And somewhere out in Colorado, there was a school my daughter was going to love.
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May you like
Some people walk into your life wearing the exact face you've been hoping for. The hard part isn't finding out they were never who they said they were. It's learning to trust your own read on people again afterward.
Have you ever had to rebuild your life after someone you trusted turned out to be hiding something big? Tell me about it in the comments — you're not the only one.
