System Husband: One Divorce and I'm Gone novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Fake Divorce
Brody's post goes viral, Margot storms home and begs Nolan for a fake divorce, and a system only he can see tells him the price. He signs.
At noon on Sunday, Brody Keene told his three million followers that he was ready to settle down.
By four o'clock, two million of them had watched him say it, and every comment asked the same thing.
Who is the lucky woman?
I was at the kitchen counter refilling the pill organizer when my sister turned her phone around to show me.
"That's your wife in the background," she said. "That's her scarf."
It was Margot's scarf, the grey one, and her hand was on his shoulder.
I had not seen that hand in eight months.
I snapped the last Sunday lid shut and set the organizer back in its place by the coffee maker.
I filled it every week whether she was home or not.
"Don't," she said. "Don't do the face. You do the face and then you fold."
"I'm not doing a face."
"You're doing the face."
A car door slammed outside, hard enough that we both looked.
Margot came up the porch steps fast.
At the top she stopped and pressed her palm flat against her breastbone, the way she always did when she ran, and stood there breathing.
Then she came in without knocking at her own front door.
She had on sunglasses and the good coat, and her hair was wet from the car wash or from crying.
"Nolan." She took the sunglasses off. "Thank God. We have a problem."
She looked at Millie once and did not say hello.
Millie said, "Hi, Margot, it's only been a year."
"Eight months," Margot said, and turned back to me. "Brody posted that thing without telling me. Now he wants something official. He's saying if I don't put a ring on it he'll go public with everything."
"Everything," I said.
"Us. The whole mess. My sponsors would walk, Nolan. All of them. Do you know what that costs?"
She pulled out a chair and sat down at the table.
I stayed standing.
"I need you to do something for me," she said, softer now. "It's a small thing."
"Say it."
"A divorce." She said it fast. "A fake one. Papers, a courthouse, your name off the house for a few days. Brody sees it's done and calms down, I get my sponsors through the quarter, and then we undo it."
Millie laughed out loud, one sharp note.
Margot didn't look at her.
"You'd move out for a week," she said. "Stay at Millie's. Nobody can know it's fake, Nolan, not even your family. That's how it works."
"Millie's standing right here."
"Then Millie has to keep quiet."
"I'm going to throw up," Millie said.
I looked at my wife.
She had her ring on. She had not taken it off to stand next to him, and for a second I wondered why that mattered to me.
"You'll be back before you know it," Margot said. "I'll fix everything. I promise. Nothing will really change."
It was a smooth speech.
She had given it to someone before, I thought, maybe on a call, maybe in the car outside.
Millie put both hands flat on the table.
"Nolan. Say no. Say the word. It's one syllable."
Then the blue panel opened in front of my eyes.
Nobody else had ever seen it, not in three years.
It hung over the coffee maker, where it had hung over every dinner, every hospital bill and every night I'd spent awake on the ground floor listening to her breathe.
The first line was the one I knew by heart.
HUSBAND SYSTEM: BOND STATUS ACTIVE.
Under it, new text came in, one line at a time.
DIVORCE REQUEST DETECTED.
IF A DIVORCE IS FILED, THE BOND ENDS AND THE HOST IS REMOVED FROM THIS WORLD 7 DAYS AFTER THE FILING.
NO ONE WILL REMEMBER THE HOST.
DISCLOSURE TO THE SPOUSE IS FORBIDDEN.
I read it twice.
Three years ago a voice in a hospital stairwell had offered me a deal, and I had said yes before it finished the terms.
She had lived.
That was all I'd asked for.
Now she sat at my table with her hair wet and her boyfriend's video still playing on my sister's phone, and she wanted me to sign her out of my life so that he would stay.
I thought about the eight months.
The dinners I'd cooked and left in the fridge with her name on the lid, and the ones she'd photographed on a restaurant table in another city.
I thought about how many nights I'd told myself that tonight was the night I'd call.
"You're sure it's only a week," I said.
"Seven days." She reached across the table and took my hand. "Maybe less."
Her fingers were cold.
They were always cold now, and she never asked why I kept the heat up.
Millie said, "Nolan."
"I know."
"Don't you dare."
Margot's phone buzzed on the table.
The screen lit up with his name and a gym selfie, and she turned it face down without answering.
"Please," she said. "I only have you."
It was almost true.
She had me and a man with a ring light, and she had picked the second one in public and the first one in private.
I could still tear it up.
I knew that.
I had the whole length of the table to decide.
So I took the pen from her bag and signed.
My name looked steady on the line.
Margot closed her eyes in relief. "Thank you. I knew I could count on you."
She kissed my cheek.
Outside, a horn sounded twice, and a man's voice called her name from a car I couldn't see.
She picked up her bag, and she was gone before the pen stopped rolling.
I stood at the counter and watched the porch light come on by itself.
The panel hadn't closed.
FILING SCHEDULED: MONDAY 9:00 A.M.
REMOVAL: 168 HOURS AFTER THE STAMP.
I looked at the full pill organizer for a long time.
Then I picked it up off the counter and put it in my bag.
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