Jenna stayed. Lila eventually stayed too, though she asked that approval for new consultants require a second review instead of one person's signature. I agreed and placed the rule in our operating procedures. It seemed absurd that a woman who had once managed a two-hundred-person wedding with perfect precision had been careless about a two-page agreement with someone she called a friend. The rule was not a grand moral victory. It was a small barrier against repeating a specific mistake.
At Christmas, I went to Franklin to spend the morning with Caroline's family. Her daughters pulled me into a game of charades, and for a little while I forgot that my marriage was ending. Then someone brought out a box of ornaments, including one I had given Caroline the year Ethan and I bought our house. It was a little wooden guitar he'd made for me after a string of difficult client meetings, and I'd passed it to her because it didn't match the decorations I wanted that season.
I held the ornament in my palm and remembered Ethan sitting at the kitchen table sanding its edges. He had been so pleased with himself that he'd carved a crooked little star on the back. I had laughed at him affectionately, then told him it was sweet before putting it aside. Caroline watched my face and said nothing. She knew by then that the hardest parts of my grief lived inside objects too ordinary to carry a headline.
I asked if I could borrow the ornament for a while. She said yes, and I hung it beside the kitchen window when I returned home. I did not put it on social media. I did not send a photograph to Ethan. I simply let it remind me of a man who had spent years loving me through actions I was too impatient to value.
The divorce negotiations began in earnest after New Year's. Ethan wanted the house sold rather than one of us carrying the memories and mortgage alone. We agreed to an independent appraisal and a division of proceeds after shared obligations were settled. The dogs, June and Pepper, were less simple. We had adopted them together from a rescue in East Nashville, and both followed Ethan's voice as though it were the safest sound in the world.
We worked out a practical arrangement with alternating time and clear information about veterinary care. Neither of us pretended the dogs were a substitute for children, but their routines mattered because they were living creatures who had not chosen any part of our separation. One afternoon I met Ethan in a park to exchange them. Pepper ran toward him so hard the leash almost pulled free of my hand.