For how small the whole thing had become.
Months earlier, Laura had raised a glass in a room full of people and described him as evidence that she had outgrown me.
By spring, he was a forwarding address.
The final mediation happened on a cold afternoon.
We signed most documents in separate rooms.
Near the end, I walked into the hallway while Michael took a call.
Laura was standing near the elevators.
Alone.
She looked tired.
Not ruined.
Not destroyed.
Just tired in the ordinary human way that consequences make people tired.
“Greg.”
I stopped.
She approached.
Caught my sleeve lightly.
“Is there anything I can do to make you stay?”
The question hurt because part of me had spent years wanting to hear some version of it.
Not after the affair.
Not after the restaurant.
Years earlier.
When evenings disappeared into work.
When our conversations became logistics.
When I started sleeping beside someone whose attention lived somewhere else.
I looked at her.
For a moment, every version of Laura existed at once.
The twenty-six-year-old marketing woman who walked into my office and told me my company logo looked like it belonged on a plumbing van.
The bride in Plano laughing because I almost dropped the ring.
The woman barefoot in our first apartment eating Chinese food from cartons because we had no table.
The entrepreneur painting the first Laurel Row wall herself.
The woman on the velvet sofa in the magazine.
The stranger raising champagne.
“You could have asked me that before you laughed,” I said.
Laura closed her eyes.
Nodded.
No argument.
No speech.
I touched her shoulder once.
Walked toward the elevators.
Did not turn around.
The divorce became final on a gray Tuesday in February.
No dramatic courtroom.
No audience.