My Husband Timed Our Marriage, So I Ran Out the Clock novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Seventeen Minutes
At a firm dinner Stewart tells the table his wife has seventeen minutes left this year, and Hannah spends them leaving him. A text on the sidewalk says she has nine left.
Delaney tapped her wine glass with a fork, slid the bread basket toward me, and smiled at my husband.
"Settle it for the table, Stewart," she said. "How many minutes does Hannah have left this year?"
Twelve people sat at the long table in the back room of the restaurant.
It was the firm's dinner for Delaney's promotion, and I was the only one there who did not work for the firm.
My husband did not look at me.
He took out his phone and read the screen.
"Seventeen minutes," said Stewart.
The whole table laughed.
One of the partners hit the tablecloth with his palm.
Delaney had her own phone out already, her thumb resting on the glass.
"Told you," she said. "To the minute."
Stewart gave a small, satisfied nod, the one he gave when a client said his rate was fair.
Nobody at that table needed the seventeen explained.
In six years of marriage, Stewart gave me five free hours a year.
Anything past that, he reminded me, cost three thousand dollars an hour.
It was the second week of November.
I had spent my year on a birthday dinner, a hospital fundraiser, one rainy Sunday in March, and two hours, door to door, with my parents in Binghamton.
"What about me?" Delaney said.
She tilted her face up at him with her chin on her hand.
She was thirty-nine, she ran his calendar as a favor, and she had been kind to me at every party for six years.
When I had the flu at our anniversary, she was the one who sent soup.
Stewart reached over and ruffled her hair.
"You don't need a timer," he said. "I've never counted a minute I spent on you."
"Not one," Delaney said, laughing.
Somebody at the end of the table said, "Seventeen minutes, Hannah, make them count," and more people laughed.
Tonight's dinner had a forty-minute limit, and Stewart had checked his watch twice already.
In bed, the clock started when he kissed me, and at twenty minutes he pulled away.
I used to tell myself that was just how a man like Stewart was built.
I picked up my napkin and folded it.
I thought about what I could do with seventeen minutes.
I could sit there and smile until the dessert came, the way I had at every dinner since I met him.
I could go home and wait up.
I put the napkin down.
"Then I'll spend them now," I said.
Nobody laughed at that.
Stewart turned to me with his thumb still on his phone.
"Hannah, this isn't the place."
"You picked the place," I said. "You picked it when you answered."
I stood up.
I pulled the ring off my finger, and it came off easily, because I had lost weight in the last year and he had never noticed.
I dropped it into his water glass.
It made a small, clean sound against the bottom.
"I'm leaving you," I said. "You can all hear that, and it didn't cost anyone a dime."
A waiter at the door froze with a tray of tiny desserts.
Delaney's mouth opened.
"Oh, honey," she said. "He didn't mean it like that. Sit down, we'll fix this."
She sounded so sincere that for one second I almost did.
Then I looked at Stewart.
He was fishing the ring out of the glass with two fingers, and he was looking at his watch.
I took my coat from the back of my chair.
"Hannah," he said, in his courtroom voice. "You have fifteen minutes left, not seventeen. You've used two."
"Keep them," I said.
I walked the length of the room with twelve people watching me go.
Nobody got up.
On the sidewalk it was raining hard, and I did not have an umbrella, and I did not go back for one.
I stood under the awning of a dry cleaner next door with my arms wrapped around myself.
My hands were shaking, and I was not sorry.
It was the first time in six years that I had not been sorry.
My phone buzzed.
It was Stewart.
"You have nine minutes left this year," the text said. "I would spend them coming back inside."
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