Chapter 10: Filed

I filed for divorce at eleven o'clock on Saturday night.

I did it at Daniel's kitchen table, with a glass of cheap red wine at my elbow.

My lawyer had sent the final draft at ten.

It denied every word of Brodie's petition.

It asked for the house, the deed and the shares to come back to the person who had paid for them.

I read the last page twice.

Then I pressed submit, and a small green box on the screen said: Filed.

The kitchen was very quiet.

Daniel was standing at the stove with his back to me, pretending to do something to a kettle that was already boiling.

"It's done," I said.

"Good."

"It says Filed. With a capital F."

"That's very official."

"Turn around, Daniel."

He turned.

He looked tired and careful, and he stood with his hands gripping the edge of the counter behind him.

I stood and walked around the table until there were two feet between us.

"I want to say something plainly," I said, "because I think you've been telling yourself a version of this for years."

"Susannah."

"I married Brodie when I was twenty-six, and my dad had been dead for four months."

"I know."

"I chose the first man who sat beside me in that silence and didn't ask me to talk. I'd have chosen a bus."

His jaw moved.

"I'm not choosing like that now. I'm thirty-four, and I'm sober, and I've had a very clear week."

I held his gaze.

"If I wanted to go back to him, I'd be at Esther's house with a casserole."

"Is that a joke?"

"It's the truth, with a joke in it."

I pressed my palm flat to his chest, over the place where it had stood in the stairwell.

"I'm filed," I said. "Your rule."

He looked at my hand.

"There's a second rule," he said. "A judge hasn't signed anything."

"Daniel Reeve, if you find a third rule I'll go to Vermont without you."

He laughed once, helplessly.

Then he stopped laughing, and his hands came up off the counter and into my hair.

He kissed me with nothing held back.

It was slow for a moment, and then it was not.

I got my fingers in his shirt and dragged it up, and he lifted his arms and let me.

Keep reading free with an account. Start She Handed Me a Paper Plate, So I Canceled Her Whole Family from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.