She Came Home With More Than A Suitcase

We stayed on the line for another minute without talking.

Then Jenna said she was sorry, in the genuine exhausted way of someone who has been sorry for a long time and is only now finding the right moment to say it out loud.

I told her she had done the right thing.

After I hung up I sat in the apartment for a long time. The city lights moved outside the window. The coffee table had the two beer bottles on it, both of them unfinished. The framed photo that had been on the end table was on the floor, tilted against the rug, because Mia had knocked it when she pulled her suitcase toward the door. I looked at it from across the room and I did not get up to put it back.

In the morning I called my attorney.

Her name was Patricia Okafor and she had handled the incorporation of the small design firm I had built over seven years, the one that Mia had occasionally referred to as Jimmy's little project in the early years before the revenue made that description awkward. Patricia was direct, methodical, and had seen every variant of this conversation that a divorce proceeding could produce. I told her the timeline. I told her about Atlanta. I told her about the six months.

She said: "The Atlanta piece changes the character of the asset exposure. If she was conducting this relationship during the period when your firm was completing its last equity round, we need to document the timeline very carefully."

I had not thought about that. I thought about it then.

The equity round had closed in December. The firm had been valued at a number that was meaningfully different from the number it had been valued at when Mia and I married. The marital estate, under our state's laws, included assets accumulated during the marriage. A contested divorce with a timeline that overlapped with the equity round was a different kind of conversation than a clean split.