My divorce became final in the months that followed, after the required steps had been completed and the settlement approved. There was no dramatic courtroom speech. Rebecca called to confirm that the decree had been entered, emailed me the document, and asked whether I wanted to schedule a final review of anything outstanding. I thanked her and stood beside the apartment window looking down at a delivery truck maneuvering into a narrow parking space.
I had imagined I would feel as though a door had slammed. Instead it felt as though a door I'd been holding open for a long time had finally closed under its own weight. The silence was different. It no longer sounded like waiting for somebody to return. It sounded like being alone in a home I had chosen for myself.
Nora's divorce took longer. Her lawyers and Colin's lawyers needed to resolve questions about the family home, retirement accounts, and a parenting arrangement that would keep Oliver's school year as stable as possible. Nora refused to treat the process as a contest in which Colin had to lose everything before she could feel safe. She also refused proposals that depended on trusting verbal promises in place of written agreements.
Colin struggled with those boundaries. Once, after a difficult mediation session, he called to tell her that all the paperwork made them seem like enemies. Nora told him she wished they could communicate without attorneys, too, but that the reason the agreements were necessary was not a lack of goodwill on her part. It was the long history of important information becoming negotiable whenever he wanted a different outcome.
"I don't want to spend the rest of our son's childhood fighting you," she told him. "I want us to have a schedule he can rely on, a way to make decisions he understands, and enough distance that we don't turn every pickup into an argument. That isn't punishment. It's a plan."
For once Colin listened. He did not become a different man overnight, but the arguments began to shrink as the arrangements grew familiar. He attended Oliver's school concert in the spring, sat on the opposite side of the auditorium from Nora, and remained afterward to tell his son he'd played beautifully. Nora was able to say she was glad he'd come without pretending she wanted him to come home with her.
In February, a little more than a year after our first coffee together, Nora and I went on what we agreed to call a date. The decision had taken two conversations and several walks, because neither of us wanted to wake up afterward wondering whether one person thought it meant more than the other. We chose a small restaurant near the river and decided not to discuss our ex-spouses unless something truly needed discussing. It sounded simple and turned out to be surprisingly difficult.
We talked about her shop, my business, the worst jobs we'd ever had, and the books we kept pretending we'd finish. She told me about a summer spent driving across Pennsylvania with her father to buy old picture frames at estate sales. I told her about the first restoration contract Malik and I completed, an old stairway that looked sound until we lifted a tread and found that half the stringer had been eaten away by years of moisture.