Chapter 4: Five A.M.

The divorce hearing was on a Tuesday, and I did not go.

I sent my lawyer and stayed in a hotel room across the river with the curtains shut.

I could not sit in a courtroom and look at the back of my husband's head.

Every time I closed my eyes I saw our bed, and his hand pulling the sheet over her.

The test from the bathroom sat folded in my coat pocket, two lines on it, and I touched it every hour.

No one knew, not Lachlan, not his lawyers, not Cordelia.

Whatever the court decided, I was keeping my child.

Cordelia came to the hotel at noon with a paper bag of soup.

"You should go down there," she said, for the third time that morning.

"Tell him what you think of him, once, to his face."

"Then you can move on," she added.

I smiled a little.

"You share his last name," I said. "You should be on his side."

"I have never done what a last name told me to," Cordelia said, and put the soup in my hands.

I looked at my bare ring finger.

It had been bare for three days, and it still felt wrong.

Cordelia climbed onto the bed and rested her chin on her fists.

"So what happens now?"

"I'm going somewhere quiet," I said. "I have enough saved to rent a small place. I'm going to paint for one year, and nothing else."

Saying it aloud made it solid.

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