Chapter 7
The divorce was finalized in November. The terms were what the prenuptial agreement said they would be, which was what I had known they would be, which was why Brent's attorney had spent three months attempting to find a different interpretation and had not found one because there was not one to find. Brent retained the car and the joint savings account and none of the things that had ever been mine alone.
I did not feel victorious about it. Victory is for contests, and what had happened was not a contest. It was an accounting. A long, slow, overdue accounting that had required a locked door on a rainy night to arrive at its final number.
Molly came for dinner the week after the papers were signed. She brought wine she knew I would not drink yet because I was still nursing, and flowers from the farmer's market because she knew I preferred those to florist arrangements, and she sat in the kitchen while I made the soup I had been making since I learned to cook and Ivy slept in the next room, and at one point she looked at me across the kitchen island with the expression she used when she was deciding whether to say something.
"You knew he was going to do something like this," she said. "Eventually."
I thought about it. The prenuptial agreement signed before the wedding. The title never amended. The mortgage paid off and the paperwork filed cleanly every year as if I had always understood I might someday need it to stand alone. The conversation with Jennifer before the marriage where Jennifer had said let's make sure everything is clear just in case and I had said yes let's do that and we had made sure.
"I didn't know what it would look like," I said. "I just knew it was coming."
Molly was quiet for a moment.
"Mom would have said you always were the careful one," she said.
May you like
I looked out the east-facing kitchen window at the backyard in the November dark, at the fence and the yard where Ivy would eventually learn to walk and then run and then whatever came after running, in a house that had only one name on the title and always would.
"Mom was right," I said.
