“What the hell is this?” Natalie stood just inside our front door with the handle of her suitcase in one hand and her sunglasses in the other.
She had been home for less than thirty seconds, but the expression on her face had already passed through surprise, disbelief, and something that looked almost like personal offense.
Her eyes moved from the empty rectangle on the wall where our wedding photograph had hung for nine years to the gray folder lying open on our coffee table. She knew what the papers were before she touched them. I could tell by the way she stopped breathing.
I was sitting on the couch with a book open across my knees. I hadn't read much of it. The house was quiet except for the refrigerator's distant hum and the tires of a delivery truck rolling along our street. Outside, an ordinary September afternoon was unfolding in a suburb north of Columbus, Ohio. A neighbor was mowing his lawn, a dog was barking two houses down, and the maple tree by our driveway was already starting to turn red. Nothing in the world seemed to understand that twelve years of marriage had just arrived at an ending.
Natalie dropped her sunglasses onto the entryway table. “Daniel. What is this?”
“You know what it is.”
She crossed the room in four quick steps. Her emerald-green blouse looked freshly pressed, and the black leather skirt she'd chosen for her return was one I had never seen before. There was a faint floral scent around her that wasn't the perfume she kept in our bathroom. Her suitcase remained beside the door, tipped against the wall as though she still expected me to carry it upstairs. When she reached the coffee table, she put her palm flat on the first page.
“You can't do this.”
“I already did.”
She read the heading again, then looked at me. “You're serious?”
“Yes.”
“You filed for divorce because I took eleven days to think?”
I closed the book and set it aside. “You didn't go away to think. You went away to date other men. I told you before you left what that would mean for our marriage.”
“Don't twist my words.”
“I haven't changed a single one of them.”