“We are,” I said. I kissed the top of his head. “We are exactly where we’re supposed to be.”
The Coleman scandal faded from the Manhattan headlines over the months that followed. I heard through Steven that David had received a suspended sentence contingent on repayment of the back taxes, and was working as a junior clerk in a firm that bore no resemblance to the company he had imagined himself building. I heard that Allison had gone back into the city. I heard that Megan had moved into her mother’s apartment.
I did not feel joy at any of it. I felt, genuinely, almost nothing. He had become a story I had finished reading, and I had no interest in returning to it.
What I had interest in was the morning. The sound of Chloe and Aiden arguing over who got the good spoon at breakfast. The particular quality of London light coming through old glass. The consulting practice I had begun building quietly in the financial district, where my credentials were not an oddity but a serious qualification and where no one called me anyone’s wife. The life that was, for the first time in nearly a decade, entirely shaped by choices I had made for reasons that had nothing to do with managing someone else’s brittle sense of himself.
One evening, Chloe spotted something blinking in the garden bushes and called to me with the urgency of someone who has just discovered something miraculous. I went to the window and watched her try to cup it in her hands. A firefly, impossibly, in London. She turned to show me, her face lit up with the particular joy of a child who has found something the world forgot to leave for her.
I had spent eight years as a fixed asset in someone else’s ledger. A line item that generates value without requiring investment, whose presence is assumed and whose disappearance is not anticipated because it has never occurred to anyone to take it seriously as a possibility.
