Divorced, Yet He Can't Let Me Go novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Papers
Georgina sees Winslow lead Lorna out of the burning house and never look up the stairs, then drops divorce papers on his hospital bed and he laughs.
The fire reached the top of our stairs while my husband was walking another woman out the front door.
I saw it all from my bedroom doorway, one hand on the frame.
The smoke alarm had woken me, and I only hear it through my right ear.
Below me the hall carpet was burning in a line from the foot of the stairs to the front door.
Lorna stood at the bottom with a red gas can by her feet.
She held a lit lighter in her hand and she was looking up at me.
Lorna was Winslow's brother's widow, and she had lived in our guest room for eighteen months.
That night she had warmed June's bottle before Bea came to collect her, and she had left me a plate of lasagna with a note on the foil.
She did not scream, and she did not run.
She watched me.
"Winslow!" I screamed.
The study door banged open and he came down the hall in his socks.
He went straight to her.
He took her by the arm and she said something into his ear that I couldn't hear over the roar.
She snapped the lighter shut.
Winslow pulled her through the front door, and he never looked up the stairs.
I ran back into the bedroom and smashed the window with the bedside lamp.
On the lawn, my husband held Lorna's face in both his hands and checked it for burns.
I screamed his name until my throat tore.
He didn't turn around.
The smoke came in over the sill, and the lawn went dark.
I woke on a stretcher with a mask on my face and wet grass under my shoulders.
A medic leaned over me and said somebody had brought me down the back stairs and I was lucky.
I turned my head.
Winslow stood thirty feet away with his arm around Lorna, who wore a silver blanket and cried into his coat.
He was giving a statement to a police officer.
He had not come to the stretcher.
Three days later I lay in a hospital bed with a burn dressing on my left forearm and a cough that shook the rails.
My sister Bea had brought the papers in her work bag, drawn up by a friend of hers at the courthouse.
Winslow sat at the foot of my bed in the plastic chair.
Both his hands were wrapped in white gauze to the wrist.
When I looked at them he said, "Car door. Stupid."
He kept his coat on in the heat of that room.
He had sat on the very edge of that chair for three days and never once leaned back.
I didn't ask him why.
I took the papers from the tray table and dropped them in his lap.
"Sign them."
He read the first page.
Then he laughed.
It was a short laugh, the one he uses on a contractor who has promised him a date he can't keep.
"Stop being ridiculous, Georgina."
"Lorna set that fire. I watched her stand there with the lighter."
"Lorna was in the hall in her nightgown. She was crying her eyes out."
"She was smiling at me, Winslow."
He shook his head slowly.
"You breathed in a lot of smoke. You were half asleep. You don't know what you saw."
"I know what I saw. I saw you take her out and leave me on the stairs."
His jaw tightened.
"I told the police it was the kitchen stove. That's the end of it."
He held up both bandaged hands.
"And look at me. I couldn't hold a pen if I wanted to."
"Then I'll wait."
"Wait all you like."
He leaned forward, and his voice was gentle, which was worse.
"You're deaf in your left ear. You can't survive without me."
I looked at his face for a long moment.
He truly believed it.
He had believed it for four years, every time he walked on my left side and I never heard him come.
"I watched you walk out of a burning house without me," I said.
"Georgina."
"You can keep the stove story. I'm keeping my daughter."
The doctor had signed my discharge that morning.
I pulled the tape from my hand and set the cannula on the tray.
I stood up in my borrowed slippers, and I did not sway.
"So I'm leaving," I said.
Winslow stayed in the chair, and he laughed again, softer this time.
I walked out and shut the door.
Bea was waiting in the corridor with June on her hip.
My daughter reached for me with both fists and I kissed the top of her head and breathed her in.
She smelled of milk and nothing burnt.
"Did he sign?" Bea asked.
"He laughed."
"Of course he did."
We walked to the elevator, and Bea pressed the button twice.
She did not look at me.
"Georgina, there's something else. The fire department called me this morning because they couldn't reach you."
"What did they say?"
"The investigation is closed. Accidental, kitchen stove. They based it on a statement from the homeowner."
The doors opened.
"Nobody has asked me what I saw," I said.
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