Chapter 7

On the last day of the third month, I put the divorce papers on the kitchen table.

Two copies. I'd downloaded the form online and filled them in myself.

The house: his. The car: his. Daisy: mine. I wasn't asking for maintenance.

Not pride. I just didn't want money tethering us together any longer. I had income now — a steady one. A B&B owner had reached out wanting to work with me on an ongoing basis. With that and the other projects coming in, I had enough. Enough for Daisy and enough for me.

Nathan came home from work, saw the papers on the table, and stopped.

He stood there for a long time.

"Are you serious?"

"Yes."

He pulled out a chair and sat down. He went through the pages slowly.

When he got to the assets page, his hand stilled.

"You're not taking anything?"

"I'm keeping Daisy."

"The deposit on the house — that was your parents' money."

"I know. I don't want it."

"The car—"

"Nathan. I don't want it."

He looked up at me. His eyes were red at the edges.

"Is this you trying to punish me?"

I sat down across from him.

"Ten years," I said. "You don't throw ten years away out of spite. This isn't a tantrum. This is me having reached the end of something."

He pressed his fingers flat against the page.

"Can't you give me another chance?"

I looked at him for a long moment.

He was still, in some ways, the same man who'd stood outside that lecture hall all those years ago — the same jaw, the same quiet eyes, just with more lines around them, and an exhaustion in them that hadn't been there before.

"I used to think," I said, "that if I could just find the right way to say things, you'd finally hear me. So I kept trying. Different words. Different times of day. Texts, calls, waiting up. There was a period — when Daisy was still small — when the way you spoke to me made me feel like I had no reason to get up in the morning. Not dramatically. Just a grey, low feeling. Like I didn't matter enough to be worth a reply."

He flinched.

"I'm not telling you to hurt you. I'm telling you because Daisy heard the same things I heard. She's six. She started managing my feelings before she started school. That is something no child should have to do. A child that age should be thinking about nothing more difficult than what she wants to draw. Instead she was learning how to read the room because our room was not safe."

He was very still.

"It was Daisy who made me stop," I said. "A six-year-old shouldn't be the one to say Mum, stop texting Dad, he doesn't want to talk to you. But she did. And I realised that I'd pulled her into this with me. I'm the one who did that. Because I was so desperate for you to turn around that I couldn't see what it was doing to her."

I pushed the pen across the table.

"I'm not signing this to punish you. I'm signing it because I need her to grow up somewhere safer than this was."

He looked at the pen. He didn't pick it up.

"What if I've changed?" he said. "You've seen me try these past two months."

"You have tried."

"But?"

"But what made you try? Think about what made you start doing those things."

He said nothing.

"You were scared," I said. "Not heartbroken. Scared. Someone who'd been following you around for a decade suddenly stopped, and you felt the absence. That's real — I'm not saying it isn't. But that's not love. That's what happens when something you relied on disappears. It's withdrawal. It's not the same thing."

His hands were trembling slightly.

He said he really was sorry. I said sorry wasn't the same as love either.

He closed his eyes. One tear — just one — rolled down the side of his face. He had cried in front of me twice in all the years I'd known him. Once when Daisy was born. This was the second time.

I watched him and I felt — not relief, not vindication. Just quiet. The kind of quiet that comes when something has finally stopped burning after a very long time.

"If you want to go through the courts, I understand," I said, standing up.

"No." His voice had gone rough. "No, I'll sign it."

He picked up the pen. He wrote his name in the space provided — careful, deliberate, the last stroke trailing longer than it needed to, as if he wasn't ready to lift the pen.

When he'd finished, he set it down and looked at me.

"Can I still see Daisy? Regularly?"

"Of course. She's your daughter."

He nodded. He opened his mouth once more and then seemed to decide against whatever it was.

Just like he always had.

Only the silence between us felt different now. Before, the silence was his and I had filled it. Now neither of us was filling it.

That, too, was a kind of ending.