He didn’t ease into it. He didn’t look ashamed. He sat down across from me, laced his fingers together on the counter like he was about to present quarterly numbers, and explained that he was “starting over.” Her name was Sienna. She was twenty-six. She worked at his firm. He said she made him feel alive in a way he hadn’t felt in years, and he said it with the kind of conviction that made it clear he’d been rehearsing.
I remember looking at my coffee mug. It was the one our daughter had painted for me in sixth grade — uneven letters, chipped handle, an attempted flower on the side that looked more like a sun. I just kept looking at it while he talked.
He said he’d “handled everything.” That was the phrase he used. Handled everything. As if a marriage ending was a logistics problem. As if nineteen years and two children and a house full of memories were an agenda item he’d crossed off between conference calls.
The destination wedding was his idea, of course. A resort somewhere overseas — turquoise water, imported flowers, an open bar and a DJ and everyone Ethan had ever wanted to impress. He invited his parents. He invited our mutual friends, people who’d sat at my dinner table and drunk my wine and held my hand at my father’s funeral. He invited our teenagers — Marcus, who was seventeen and already moving through the world with his father’s jaw and his father’s certainty, and Lily, who was fifteen and had spent the last three weeks barely speaking to me, as if I were somehow responsible for the inconvenience of it all.
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