Chapter 3

I started packing. In seven days the new buyer would take possession.

I wasn't going to touch Richard's and Ethan's things. I was only going to take mine.

I was shoving a small mountain of old photo albums into a suitcase when his voice came from behind me.

"There we go. That's a sight I can live with. Still trying to pretend you belong at a concert hall — you have no idea how embarrassing you were tonight."

Richard's brow was furrowed. That had been his default expression around me ever since I'd turned thirty-five.

I didn't answer. I threw the last of the trash into a bag, walked over to him, and handed him the divorce agreement.

He took it with the same dismissive shrug he used for everything I gave him. Then his eyes focused on the header.

His face went red. He hurled the pages onto the floor.

"Are you done? This is about one concert? You had to blow it up at the venue, and now this?"

Ethan finally looked over from the couch and saw the pages on the hardwood.

The annoyance on his face was almost comic.

"Mom, seriously? Is missing a concert going to kill you? You've survived the last fifty years without one, haven't you?"

I looked at him.

When he was small he used to take my hand and tell me he'd take me everywhere. Every city. Every symphony on the planet.

He'd forgotten all of that.

He'd grown, year by year, into a copy of his father. He couldn't see me anymore.

"Oh, now you're trying to measure up to Vivienne. What do you even have in common with her?"

He warmed to the comparison. "She's the same age as you and she still looks like that. If she goes to Carnegie Hall, no one blinks. You sit in the same row and people think you're the cleaning lady who wandered in."

He actually laughed. Like it was witty.

I looked at him — really looked, the way a stranger would. "I didn't get old overnight. If I hadn't spent forty years raising you, running this house — I could have been as polished as she is."

He cut me off before I finished. "A little housework? You're going to dress that up like a tragedy? Honestly, Mom, you're just less than her, full stop. I guarantee you Vivienne could run a career and a household in her sleep."

"Could you just stop? You're embarrassing yourself. Divorces are for young women. For you, honestly — you don't even know if you're going to be alive tomorrow."

Something in my head went white.

I had carried this child in my body. Fed him from it. And this was what he'd become.

I stood there, my hands trembling. For one absurd second I thought I might actually collapse.

Richard at least had the decency to look uncomfortable.

But he'd been sitting on the throne I'd spent forty years building for them, and there was no climbing down from it now. He wasn't going to apologize.

He walked me into the kitchen instead and sighed.

"You know how he gets. Don't take it personally. Do the dishes and get to bed."

"And the divorce papers — I'm going to pretend I didn't see them. Don't embarrass yourself."

Even now. Even after tonight. He was warning me.

As if the life I had was a favor he was generous enough to keep extending.

He pushed me in front of the sink. It was a war zone.

Two nights ago Ethan had brought over a dozen of his friends. I'd felt ill — the pain in my stomach had been bad for weeks — and I hadn't cleaned up that night.

So the mess had sat there. Untouched.

Because no one else in this house would touch it. That job had apparently been stamped with my name the day I moved in.

I looked at the plates crusted with half-eaten takeout and I saw my whole life — me, on my hands and knees, in the garbage of other people's meals.

Then I noticed something gold in the greasy dishwater.

I fished it out.

A thin gold chain.

It was the necklace Richard had given me on our wedding day, forty years ago. We couldn't afford a ring, he'd told me. He'd spent every dollar he had on this chain. He'd told me — swore to me — there would be more.

I'd believed him.

Now I understood. The whole forty-year marriage had been a lie from the first sentence.

Richard had never loved me.

I had simply been the cheapest acceptable woman within his reach.