Chapter 4
Not dramatically. Not with any announcement. One step, backward and sideways, the movement of a man quietly removing himself from the center of something he has realized is considerably larger than he was told when he agreed to be in it.
I stood in the middle of Marcy's living room and looked at my husband and tried to find the version of Aaron I had been married to for six years, the steady and reliable man I had decided was not paying attention, and I could not find him anywhere in the face in front of me.
What I found instead was someone who had been paying exquisite attention for the entirety of our marriage, and had simply been waiting to see whether I was the person he believed I was, or the one I had spent four days proving myself to be.
The party did not end right away. Parties in Millbrook never end right away because nobody wants to be the first person to acknowledge that what they witnessed was what they witnessed. People drifted toward the kitchen. Someone turned the television up slightly. Marcy made a point of going to check on something in the hallway that did not need checking on.
Aaron picked up the ring from the table and put it in his pocket.
He picked up his phone.
He looked at me one more time with that same unhurried expression and said, "My lawyer will be in touch Monday."
Then he walked to the front door, took his jacket from the hook, and left.
The door closed behind him with the sound of a door that has been closed rather than slammed, which is a different sound and a worse one. Slammed doors leave space for revision. A door that closes evenly and completely says something about the person who closed it that cannot be walked back.
I sat down in the chair Tyler had been standing behind.
May you like
Marcy came out of the hallway. She did not say anything. There was nothing in her catalog of agreements for this particular situation.
Tyler left thirty minutes later with a brief nod in my direction that managed to communicate, in one small motion, that whatever he had understood himself to be participating in over the previous three weeks had not been the thing he was now apparently part of, and that he would prefer to be somewhere else.
