The Love We Missed novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: One Condition
On our seventh anniversary my husband asks for a divorce, and I give him one condition and take him to the bistro to read his offer, where a skillet nobody ordered arrives from the chef: his brother, back in town.
On our seventh anniversary, my husband told me he'd met the woman he actually wanted.
I was wiping down the kitchen island.
Patrick stood in the doorway in his good gray suit with his briefcase still in his hand.
"I want a divorce, Aileen."
He said it to the cabinet over my head.
He had practiced it in the car.
The pot roast was resting on the cutting board behind me.
I'd bought the chuck on my way home from the five a.m. shift, and the candles on the table weren't lit yet.
The two times he'd brought it up before, I had cried until four in the morning.
I begged him to tell me what I'd done wrong.
Both times, I packed Nellie's lunch the next morning and kissed him at the door.
The second time, he told me that even my breathing got on his nerves.
That was March.
In July, a payment of twenty-nine hundred dollars to an apartment on Walnut Street showed up in our joint account.
It came out again in August, and again in September.
I'd stopped crying in July.
I put the rag down and turned around.
"Fine," I said. "One condition."
Patrick blinked at me.
"Sell the house, and I'll sign."
His mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
He'd had a speech ready for my tears, and he had nothing for this.
"That's it?" he said.
I slid the roast into a container and snapped the lid on.
I tossed the cutting board in the sink.
"Have I ever lied to you?"
"You're not eating?"
"Not here." I dried my hands on the towel. "If we're ending this, let's do it properly."
I picked up my phone, put it on speaker and called his mother.
She answered on the fourth ring.
Behind her, glasses clinked and a roomful of women laughed at something.
"Aileen, I have people here."
"Could you do us a favor and pick Nellie up from daycare?" I said. "Patrick and I need tonight to talk through the divorce."
The noise behind her stopped.
"What did you just say?"
"Keep her at your place tonight, please. We'll talk later."
I hung up.
Patrick's jaw went tight, and then it loosened into a little smile.
He thought I'd called in his mother to fight for me.
His mother had never once picked me over him.
"Fine," he said. "Let's go somewhere."
We walked two blocks down to the bistro on Bryant Street.
I'd never been inside.
It had opened under a new chef in August, and I worked mornings.
The tables were small and close, and there was an open window through to the kitchen.
Patrick slid the menu across to me.
"Get whatever you want. I've got it."
It was the joint account. He didn't have anything.
I ordered the roast chicken and didn't argue.
The second the waiter walked off, Patrick opened his briefcase and took out a stapled stack of paper.
A separation agreement.
He'd brought it to our anniversary.
"Here's what I'm thinking for the split," he said. "You don't want the stress of a mortgage on a pastry cook's pay."
"Go on."
"So I keep the house. Clean title, no hassle for you. I wire you sixty thousand, and we're done."
"My grandmother put ninety thousand into that house."
"And the market's soft." He tapped the page. "Sixty is generous, Aileen."
I looked at him for a long moment.
"You'll default inside a year," I said.
His face changed.
"Excuse me?"
"The mortgage is twenty-two hundred. Walnut Street is twenty-nine hundred. Both of them come out of the account my paychecks go into."
Patrick's ears went red.
"I'm a vice president at a reputable firm," he said. "I have never missed a payment in my life."
"You've never missed one because I make them."
He stared at me.
Then he gathered up the papers and slid them back into the briefcase.
"Let's eat," he said.
The runner came out and set down a small cast-iron skillet between us.
Baked mac and cheese, still bubbling at the edges.
The breadcrumbs on top were browned dark and flecked with red.
"We didn't order this," I said.
Patrick's fork stopped halfway to the pan.
He put two fingers to his temple.
I knew exactly what he was thinking.
The basement studio in Bloomfield, thirteen years ago.
I used to make this skillet every night and wait up for him to come home from the produce trucks at two.
He thought I'd ordered it so I could make him remember.
"Aileen," he said, before I'd opened my mouth. "Stop."
"I didn't say anything."
"I was twenty-three. I was dead on my feet, and I said a lot of things I had no business promising." He set down his fork. "Nobody should be held to a line he typed at twenty-three."
I looked down at the red flecks in the crumbs.
Hot sauce.
I'd only ever made it that way in one kitchen, for one man.
The waiter leaned in with a little smile. "From the chef."
He nodded at the window to the kitchen.
A big man in whites was wiping his hands on a towel at the pass.
He had a gray streak at one temple, and he was looking straight at me.
Ciaran Phelan.
My husband's older brother, who had left Pittsburgh the week after our wedding and never once come home.
Nobody had told me he was back.
Patrick didn't even turn his head.
"Great," he muttered. "The fry cook."
He had known all along.
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