He Signed His Divorce Without Reading It, Now He Kneels novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Two Weeks a Month

Genevieve leaves for Cambridge while Iris sits in her chair and Lorna warns her a VanBuren wife does not leave a house in mourning; on the lab stairs Alasdair asks if it is done and kisses her.

I left on Sunday morning with one suitcase and my laptop bag.

Colin was at the kitchen table in his shirtsleeves, buttering Iris's toast.

She was in my chair again, in my gray cardigan, with her feet tucked under her.

"Cambridge," Colin said, without looking up. "For how long?"

"Two weeks a month, starting now. It's a consulting contract in a lab. I told you on Thursday."

"Did you?"

"You said, 'Fine.'"

He nodded, done with it. "Fine. Just don't make the house awkward while Iris is here."

I looked at the suitcase in my hand and the empty hook by the door where my keys had hung for three years.

"I won't," I said.

Iris lifted her red eyes to me. "Genevieve, I don't know what I'd do without you this week."

She said it softly, and she meant it. It was the worst part of her.

The doorbell rang before I could answer.

Lorna came in without waiting for anyone to open it. She wore black again, with pearls, and she carried a casserole dish in both hands.

She looked at Iris first, with her mouth pressed flat. Then she looked at my suitcase.

"Where is she going?"

"Cambridge, Mother," Colin said. "Work."

"On a Sunday. In the week of her brother-in-law's funeral."

"The contract starts tomorrow," I said. "I wanted to settle in."

Lorna set the casserole on the counter and came toward me.

She was an inch shorter than I was, and she had never once made me feel it.

"A VanBuren wife does not leave a house in mourning," she said quietly, so only I would hear. "I would hate for you to forget that."

"I'm only going to work."

"Then you'll be back for Sunday dinner. Every Sunday. Franklin would have wanted the family at the table."

Franklin had wanted something else for me, and he had told me so in his last week.

"Every Sunday," I said.

Lorna patted my cheek, twice. Her fingers were cold.

I kissed the air near Colin's head, and he lifted a hand without turning around.

Nobody walked me to the car.

I drove north with the radio off and the sealed envelope on the passenger seat.

Franklin's handwriting looked up at me from the front of it. Open the day you're free.

I wasn't free. A judge hadn't stamped anything. I put the envelope in the glove compartment and shut it.

The lab sat on the third floor of an old brick building near the river, between a coffee place and a bike shop.

The sign beside the buzzer read Seidel Therapeutics. Nine people worked there.

Alasdair Seidel was on the stairs when I came up, a mug in one hand and a pipette box under his arm.

He'd been Franklin's best friend since college, and he'd run the last trial Franklin was ever in.

Over the past year he had also become the only person who asked how I was and waited for the answer.

He stopped when he saw the suitcase.

"You're early."

"I left."

"For the lab?"

"For good. Not yet on paper."

He put the mug on the stair rail.

"Is it done?" he said, very low.

"He signed it last night. Nine pages. He never read one."

Alasdair closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them he looked at me for a long moment.

"I'm sorry," he said. "That he's the kind of man you can do that to."

"I'm not sorry."

"No," Alasdair said. "I didn't think you would be."

A door banged open on the landing above us, and a student came down with a rack of tubes. She said good morning and kept going without noticing us.

We stood on the stairs until her steps had died away.

"There's a ninety-day wait," I said. "It's sealed. Until the stamp, I'm still Mrs. VanBuren on every paper in the building."

"Then nobody here needs to hear it."

"Not yet."

He took my suitcase from me and set it on the step.

He was close enough that I could smell coffee and the cold, clean smell of the lab on his sleeves.

For the first time in three years, someone was standing near me and wanted nothing from me.

"Genevieve."

"Yes."

"I've been waiting a very long time to do this."

He kissed me on the stairwell, one hand against my jaw, slowly enough that I could have turned my face away.

I didn't.

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