I have been asked, more than once in the months since everything changed, whether I regret how long it took me. Whether I wish I had drawn the line earlier, seen more clearly, moved faster. The honest answer is that I spent a long time not knowing where the line was.
Not because I was naive, but because the people around me were very good at moving it a little at a time, in increments small enough that each one felt like an adjustment rather than a concession. By the time I understood what had happened, I was standing somewhere I never would have agreed to stand at the beginning. The divorce was finalized on a Tuesday, in a courtroom that smelled of recycled air and carpet cleaner, with a judge who spoke our names once and moved on to the next case before we had even gathered our folders from the table.
I took a cab home alone, which felt right. Anthony and I had not spoken during the short walk out of the building. There was nothing left to say that our attorneys hadn’t already said more precisely.
I got into the cab, gave my address on the Upper West Side, and watched Manhattan scroll past the window in the particular way it does on cold autumn mornings — gray light, steam rising from grates, the city utterly indifferent to the private endings happening inside it. I made coffee when I got home. I stood at my kitchen counter and watched it brew and thought, with a calm that still surprises me when I look back on it, that I had just ended something that should have ended years earlier.
The phone rang less than twenty-four hours later. I recognized the number. I answered, not out of habit or obligation, but because I was curious what version of Anthony I would get.
Whether it would be the conciliatory one or the righteous one. It was the righteous one. He didn’t bother with hello.
He went straight to the thing. “What did you do, Marissa? My mother’s card was declined at Bergdorf Goodman.
They treated her like a thief.”
I leaned against the counter. My coffee was steaming. I let the silence stretch a beat longer than I normally would have, a new habit I was still getting used to.
“They didn’t treat her like anything,” I said. “They just reminded her of something you’ve both ignored. If it isn’t yours, you don’t get to use it.”
He made a sound low in his throat.
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