Claire and Nicholas After Divorce novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Birthday Toast
A student's text reaches Nicholas's phone at his own birthday dinner, and Claire reads it aloud and walks out.
My husband's phone lit up on the kitchen counter at twenty to six, an hour and a half before his birthday dinner.
Nicholas had gone to campus for a last meeting and left it behind.
I was basting a roast for twelve people, and I wiped my hands to carry the phone to his study.
The screen showed a message from Brianna B.
"Carrying your cake and I walked into a door. My knee is ruined. Kiss it better tonight?"
Under the words was a photo with no face in it.
Only legs, a pleated skirt in the blue of the architecture club, ankle socks and scuffed black loafers.
I knew that skirt.
Brianna was a junior in Nicholas's studio class, and she had stood in my kitchen in March and praised my lasagna.
She had helped me carry plates and laughed at everything I said.
I had liked her.
I put the phone down, and then I picked it up again and tapped the thread.
The passcode was his mother's birthday.
He had never once changed it.
The messages went back four months.
There were photos from a hotel on Michigan Avenue, and a joke about "my wife's little Tuesdays."
There was a plan for his birthday night, and a line from Nicholas that said, "She'll be asleep by ten. She always is."
Under it, Brianna had written, "Poor thing. She really thinks you're hers."
I read every message to the bottom.
Then I took screenshots of all of it and sent them to my own phone.
The roast was still in the oven, and it needed another half hour.
A week ago I had asked why he was out until midnight three nights running.
He had laughed and kissed my forehead.
"Studio reviews, Claire. You'd be bored."
That morning he had stood by the counter flipping through the mail.
"If anything from Corbin Home comes, throw it out. I won't have that name in this house."
"I know," I had said, and I had turned the catalogue face down.
Now I set the table for twelve, and I did not hurry.
The dean arrived at seven with a bottle of wine, and four of Nicholas's colleagues came right behind him.
Judith came last, in her pearls, and inspected the table before she said hello to me.
"You overdid the flowers," she said. "He'll think you're trying to impress someone."
Nicholas walked in at ten past seven with a wide smile and a cake box in his arms.
He saw me by the sideboard, and the smile stayed exactly where it was.
"Happy birthday," I said, and I handed him a glass.
"You're a saint, Claire."
He kissed my cheek.
His hand rested at my back, warm and easy, and I did not move away.
Dinner ran for an hour.
His colleagues laughed at his stories, and the dean praised the roast.
Judith told the table that her son had rescued me from a bedsit and a dead-end job.
"Look what he made of her," she said.
Nicholas smiled into his wine and let her say it.
At eight o'clock he tapped his glass and stood to give his own toast.
"To twelve friends who have put up with me for another year," he said.
Everyone laughed.
I stood up too.
"I have a toast as well," I said.
Nicholas's eyes flicked to my hand, and then to the phone I held in it.
His phone.
"Claire," he said, very lightly. "Not now."
"This came in for you at twenty to six."
I turned the screen so the dean could see it.
"It's from Brianna Kingsnorth, a junior in your studio class."
The dean frowned and leaned in.
"Carrying your cake and I walked into a door," I read. "My knee is ruined. Kiss it better tonight?"
Nobody moved.
A fork rang against a plate.
"There's a photo," I said, and I passed it down the table.
The dean looked at it.
He looked at Nicholas.
"The skirt is from the architecture club," one of the colleagues said quietly.
Nicholas came around the table fast.
"That's a student prank. She does this to every professor, it's a joke, Claire, give me the phone."
I held it out of his reach.
"There are four months of jokes in here. A hotel on Michigan Avenue. My Tuesdays."
His face went white.
"Sit down," Judith snapped. "You are humiliating my son in his own house."
"His house," I said.
I put the phone in the dean's hand.
Then I took the napkin off my lap and laid it on my plate.
"Nicholas, I want a divorce."
"You don't mean that."
"I'll have papers to you by morning."
I took my coat from the hook and my bag from the chair.
Nicholas caught my sleeve in the hallway, and he dropped his voice so the table would not hear.
"Be reasonable. You have no money of your own and no family. You have nowhere to go."
I took his hand off my sleeve.
"Eat your cake, Nicholas."
I walked out of the house I had kept for five years.
On the porch I opened my phone and typed a message to the only number I had never deleted.
"Tell the board I'm coming."
The reply came before I reached the gate.
"Car is already outside, Ms. Corbin."
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