After the Divorce, I Became His First Love's Sister-in-Law novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Third Time
Colin leaves Hazel in the rain to answer Delphine's call, and the next message comes from Delphine's brother Etienne, who offers her a marriage.
"I want a divorce."
I said it on the front steps of the concert hall, with two hundred donors behind me and a row of photographers in front.
It was the third time I had said it to Colin that week.
The first was Monday, at breakfast. He told me to pass the salt.
The second was Thursday, in the car. He turned up the radio.
Tonight I had played my husband's family benefit concert, as I did every year.
One nocturne, eight minutes, the piece Colin asked for on our first date and again on every anniversary.
I played it the way I always had, with a skipped note in bar nine.
I learned it at nineteen on a hospital lounge piano with one dead key, and I never unlearned the gap.
Colin had never asked me to fix it.
He sat in the front row with his eyes closed, as he always did, and he did not look at me once.
His first love, Delphine Marchand, sat beside his mother.
She had flown home from Zurich that afternoon after four years away.
When I came off the stage she crossed the room and took both my hands.
"You play it beautifully," she said. "Thank you for looking after him while I was gone."
She said it warmly, and her thumbs rubbed across my knuckles.
She looked at my fingers for a long moment before she let go.
I thanked her, because there was nothing in it to refuse.
Six days earlier, I had heard Colin tell his mother on speakerphone, "Hazel is a stand-in, Mom. A good one."
He thought I was at the pharmacy.
I had stood in the hallway with the front door key still in my hand and listened to the rest.
"She plays Delphine's piece. That's all I needed."
So tonight, with the flashes going off, I said it for the third time.
"Colin. I want a divorce."
He took my elbow and turned me away from the cameras.
"Not here, Hazel."
"Here is fine."
"Delphine is like a sister to me," he said, low and patient. "She has nobody in this city. You're not going to be petty about it."
"I'm not being petty. I heard you tell your mother what I am."
His mouth tightened for half a second.
Then his phone lit up in his hand.
The name on the screen was Delphine.
She had left the hall early, tired from the flight.
He answered before the second ring.
"I'm coming," he said. "Don't cry. Stay where you are."
I stood there with my hand still out where his arm had been.
"Colin, I am talking to you."
The rain started, hard, all at once.
He walked down the steps to the car and his driver opened an umbrella over him alone.
"Go home and cool off," he said over his shoulder. "I hope this is the last time you throw a tantrum."
He did not even look back to see if I would follow.
He believed I would be at the apartment when he got there.
The car pulled away.
Two of the photographers lowered their cameras.
The third kept shooting.
A woman in a fur wrap stepped around me with her driver's umbrella and said, loud enough for me to hear, "Poor thing. Third time this month, I heard."
It was not the third time this month.
It was the third time this week, and nobody had ever listened to the first two.
I stood in the rain in a silver gown that had cost more than my first car.
My wedding ring was already loose from three days of crying in the shower.
I pulled it off and held it in my palm.
Then my phone buzzed in my clutch.
I almost did not look.
The message was from Etienne Marchand.
He was Delphine's older brother, and a trustee of the Ashford Conservatory.
He had sat on my audition panel when I was twenty-two, and he had written me one short letter every spring since, even after I stopped answering.
I had married Colin at twenty-five and given up my place at the conservatory to do it.
*The conservatory will hold your seat until Friday. After that it goes to the next name on the list. Do you want me to come and get you?*
I read it twice.
Behind me the doors of the hall opened and the party spilled out, laughing, into the warm yellow light.
Ahead of me the street was empty.
I knew exactly what I was looking at.
His first love had called, and my husband had gone.
A man I had ignored for six years had asked one plain question.
So I answered it.
*Yes. Now.*
I dropped the ring into the gutter drain.
I did not hear it land.
The black car came around the corner in under two minutes.
The back door opened before it stopped.
Etienne Marchand got out in a dark suit with an umbrella already up, and he held it over my head.
He was taller than I remembered.
He looked at the bare finger, then at my face.
"You'll catch cold," he said.
"I'm fine."
"Hazel, before you get in, you should hear the rest of it."
"The rest of what?"
"I need a wife by the end of next month," he said. "You need a husband who doesn't walk away from you in the rain."
The photographer was still shooting, and he did not move the umbrella to hide us.
"Marry me. One year. Both of us get what we want."
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