We spent another hour reviewing the ownership structure of Oak & Stone. I held a seventy-five percent membership interest, and Ryan held twenty-five percent, a split established when we'd reorganized the company into an LLC five years earlier. Leah said the business valuation would need careful attention. Natalie had supported the company during years when it couldn't pay me a normal salary, and that support might matter in the equitable division of marital assets. I didn't argue. I remembered what she'd sacrificed, and I had no desire to rewrite history merely because the ending hurt.
Before I left, Leah asked whether I wanted her to prepare a petition. I said I wasn't sure. She handed me a folder of information and said I could take a day or a week, but that I should avoid allowing the uncertainty to paralyze me. I walked out into the afternoon with the folder tucked under my arm. The city looked exactly as it had when I'd arrived. Buses stopped along High Street, people carried lunch back to their offices, and a man outside a coffee shop was laughing into his phone. I had expected the first visit to a divorce lawyer to feel like crossing a bridge that collapsed behind me. Instead, it felt like discovering there was a road where I'd believed there was only a wall.
That evening, Ryan called. I answered because he was asking about a supplier, and we had a delivery scheduled early the next morning. We dealt with the work question in five minutes. Then he asked whether I'd heard from Natalie. I said I had, and that the messages were mostly complaints about my not responding.
“Maybe she wants you to fight for her,” he said.
“Fighting for a marriage doesn't mean fighting an unknown number of men for your wife.”
“You always were stubborn.”
“That's one way to describe having a boundary.”
Ryan was quiet. “Just don't let pride make the decision for you.”
I almost told him about the lawyer. Something kept me from doing it. It wasn't suspicion yet, only a new sense that not every thought needed to be spoken aloud, even to someone I loved. I thanked him for calling and ended the conversation.
On Thursday, one week after she'd left, I woke to clear sunlight across the bedroom floor. I'd slept for seven hours. It was the first time I hadn't dreamed of Natalie returning with an apology that changed halfway through into an argument. I made eggs, ran the dishwasher, and drove to the office without checking the location services app we used to share. I had disabled the shared location that morning after realizing I'd opened it twice in the night. It wasn't a punishment. I simply didn't want to spend my days following a small moving dot around a map.
At work I attended the crew meeting, asked Tessa about the certifications she wanted to complete, and spent an hour with Luis solving a difficult drainage problem in a customer's basement. When the day was over, I went to the grocery store. I bought milk, as Natalie had requested on the sticky note, but I also bought food I actually liked: olives she hated, spicy sausage she couldn't stand, and the kind of crusty bread she'd always said made too many crumbs. It was a ridiculous act of independence, and it felt unexpectedly good.