Divorced, Now Watch Me Rise novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Glass
In a motel on Cicero Avenue a pawnbroker tells Imogen her wedding ring is glass; Hattie arrives and finds the original of Dalton's photo, with no Brogan in it.
The pawnbroker on Cicero Avenue pressed a jeweler's loupe to my wedding ring and started to laugh.
"Sweetheart, who sold you this?"
"My husband gave it to me," I said.
"Then your husband paid for glass."
He turned the ring under the lamp so I could see the stone.
"Cubic zirconia. Good cut, but it's worth nothing. The setting is plated silver. I'll give you nine dollars."
I had worn that ring for four years.
I had turned it on my finger at every board party.
I had turned it every Sunday at Vera's table, where I was introduced as the girl from the print shop.
Vera had handed it to me the night before our wedding and said it was a Reeve heirloom.
It was a lie she had told me for four years, and I had believed it because I wanted to belong.
"Nine dollars," the pawnbroker said again. "Final."
Hattie leaned across the counter beside me.
"She'll take twenty, or I'll tell the whole street you sell glass to girls with black eyes."
My cheek had swollen overnight, and a yellow bruise was spreading from my jaw to my ear.
The pawnbroker looked at it, and then he looked away.
"Fine. Twenty."
I picked the ring up off the felt.
I didn't want twenty dollars for it.
I set it back down on the counter, and Hattie took my arm.
"Leave it," I said. "He can keep it."
Outside, the morning was grey and cold.
I had called Hattie from the motel's front-desk phone at midnight.
She had come straight from her night shift at Mercy North, still in blue scrubs under her coat.
My own phone had died at ten and wouldn't turn back on.
She hadn't said a word in the car for the first mile.
Now she steered me back to the motel and shut the room door behind us.
"Sit," she said.
She put a cold can of soda against my cheek and looked at my face for a long time.
"He hit you."
"In front of his mother and two board members."
"And nobody stopped him?"
"Lydia cried."
"Good for Lydia." Hattie's jaw was tight. "Imogen, I'm going to say one thing and then I'll shut up. Are you hurt anywhere else? Cramps, spotting, anything?"
"No. I'm okay. The baby's okay."
"You don't know that."
"I know it," I said.
She held my wrist and checked my pulse anyway, then shook her head.
"Okay. You're staying on my couch, and I'm calling a lawyer I know. Now show me the photos."
"I can't. My phone's dead."
"I'll find them."
She opened her laptop on the motel bedspread and typed for a minute.
A news site came up with a photo of me in the passenger seat of a dark car.
A man's hand was on my back, and his face was turned toward mine.
The caption said, Reeve CEO's wife and stepbrother: the photos that ended a marriage.
Hattie went very quiet.
"That's my car," she said.
"What?"
"That's the passenger seat of my Corolla. That's my dashboard, that's the crack in the window." She tapped the screen. "I drove you home from your cousin's baby shower in March. You fell asleep against the glass."
I stared at it.
"There was nobody in that car but you and me."
She picked up her own phone and scrolled back through months of photos, and I watched her thumb stop.
She turned the screen toward me.
It was the same picture.
Me in the passenger seat with my head against the window, eyes closed, and nobody beside me.
The date was March fourteenth, in the corner.
"This is the original," Hattie said. "I took it because you looked so tired. Somebody put Brogan Buckley into my picture."
"And the café one?"
She found it too.
Me at a table, laughing, with Hattie in the chair beside me holding up her coffee.
In Dalton's photo Hattie was gone, and a man in a dark coat sat in her place.
I put my hand over my mouth.
"Who else had these?" Hattie said. "Who did you send them to?"
I thought about it.
A week after the shower I had sent the whole album to one person, because she had asked so sweetly.
She wanted pictures for a card the office was making.
"Only Lydia," I said.
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