He Chose Her. I Chose Divorce novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: An Empty Chair
Russell skips his own birthday party, Maggie calls him seventeen times and collapses in front of ninety guests, loses the baby alone, and leaves him the ring, the ultrasound and divorce papers. Camille texts that he has been home since two.
By nine o'clock, ninety guests had sung happy birthday to an empty chair.
The party was on the sixtieth floor of his company's tower, and it was my husband's thirty-seventh.
Russell had not come.
I had planned every part of it myself, the band, the cake, the toast I was saving for midnight.
In my clutch was a small box with two white baby shoes inside.
I was eleven weeks pregnant, and tonight I was going to tell him.
Camille found me by the dessert table with my phone in my hand.
She had lived in our guest suite since March, since her engagement ended.
She was Russell's first love, and I had decided to be kind about it.
"Still nothing?" she asked.
"Straight to voicemail," I said. "Every single time."
"He's on the Singapore call. You know how the board gets."
She cut the first slice of his cake and put the plate in my hand so I'd have something to hold.
"He would never leave you hanging on purpose, Maggie."
Her own phone buzzed against her hip.
She turned it face down on the table without looking at it.
At twenty past nine, a cramp folded me over the plate.
I told the nearest guests I needed air and walked to the coat room with my hand flat on my stomach.
I called Russell a twelfth time and a thirteenth.
The fourteenth went to voicemail, and so did the fifteenth.
By the sixteenth, I could feel the warmth spreading through my dress.
I sat down on the floor between two racks of coats and dialed the seventeenth time.
He picked up.
"What is it, Maggie?"
Behind him there was no boardroom, only a quiet room and a clink of glass.
"I'm pregnant," I said. "I'm eleven weeks. I'm bleeding, Russell, please come."
He didn't speak for a long moment.
"You don't get to make tonight about you," he said.
Then the line went dead.
I stared at the phone.
I got up, because there were ninety people on the other side of the door and I could not die in a coat room.
I made it as far as the cake.
The floor tilted, and I was on my knees on the marble with blood running down my legs, in front of the board, the investors and half the company.
Nobody sang.
A woman I barely knew took off her wrap and pressed it around me and shouted for someone to call an ambulance.
Camille was beside me before the paramedics came.
"I've got you," she said. "I'm coming with you. I'll find him, I promise."
She rode in the ambulance and held my hand the whole way.
At the hospital, a doctor with tired eyes asked me the questions I'd rather not have answered.
Had I been treated for fertility problems?
"Five years," I said. "Three clinics. Russell came to every appointment."
I thought of the Halvorsen office, the pale carpet, the receptionist who smiled at him.
"He always went into the back room alone to sign the forms," I said. "He'd come out and say it was paperwork."
The doctor nodded and wrote something down.
At ten to one, Camille stood up.
"I'll go and get him," she said. "I'll drag him here myself if I have to."
She squeezed my fingers once and left.
I lost the baby at one-thirty in the morning, in a room with a curtain and one nurse, with nobody's hand in mine.
The nurse tore a strip of tissue and set a printout of the ultrasound on the tray, because I had asked her to.
Joanne arrived at three in her pajama pants and her work coat.
She had been my roommate in college and was now the sharpest family lawyer I knew.
She didn't say she was sorry.
She sat on the edge of the bed and waited.
"I want out," I said.
"Tonight?"
"Tonight."
"You don't have to decide in a hospital, Mags."
"I decided at nine forty-two," I said. "On the floor of the coat room."
She looked at me for a while, and then she took out her laptop.
By five she had drafted the papers at the all-night copy shop six blocks away and driven them back.
I signed on the hospital tray table with a pen the nurse lent me.
At six, Joanne drove me home to the penthouse and stayed in the car.
The doorman wouldn't meet my eye.
Upstairs, our bed was made.
Russell's side hadn't been touched.
I took off my ring and set it on his pillow.
I laid the ultrasound beside it, with the date printed on the corner, and the divorce papers on top.
I left the shoes out of it.
Those were mine.
So I left him.
I packed one bag and took the elevator down.
On the way, my phone buzzed.
It was Camille.
She had sent a photo of Russell asleep on the sofa in the guest suite, shoes off, a blanket pulled up to his chin.
Under it she had written: He's been home since two. He was so worn out, poor thing. Shall I wake him?
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