We talked about Biscuit longer than I expected. Legally, pets can be treated differently from children, but that didn't make it easier to decide where a living creature would spend the rest of his days. Celeste had chosen Biscuit, paid his first adoption fee, and posted more photographs of him than she had of either of us. I handled the vet appointments, medication, food deliveries, and most walks because my schedule, strange as it was, still put me home for those tasks more reliably. Diane asked for records of who had been caring for him and suggested we try to reach an agreement rather than use him as leverage.
That night, I sat on the living room floor and brushed Biscuit while Celeste talked on her phone in the bedroom. He rolled onto his back and pressed one paw against my wrist, demanding I keep going. I wondered how anyone explained divorce to an animal whose understanding of a home consisted of smells, voices, and the exact time dinner arrived. He wasn't a piece of property to divide neatly between boxes on a form. He was a small, loyal witness to everything we'd been too busy to see.
The following weekend I visited my mother. She lived alone in a neat little house on the other side of town, where my father had insisted on planting a pear tree that had never produced edible fruit. We sat at the kitchen table while she cut slices of a store-bought cake and tried not to ask why I had arrived looking exhausted. She knew Celeste and I had been arguing more often, but she had always been careful not to intrude. When I told her I had spoken to a lawyer, she put down her fork and listened without a single interruption.
"Are you sure this isn't about one vacation?" she asked when I finished. I told her it was partly about a vacation, but more about the money and the fact that Celeste had treated our marriage like something she could threaten whenever she didn't get her way. I described the way I'd become careful about every disagreement because I was trying not to start another fight. My mother looked at my hands, rough from work, and said that the first years of marriage had been hard for her and my father too. Then she added, "Hard isn't the same as being afraid to speak."
I stayed for dinner. My mother asked whether I'd considered counseling, and I said I had raised the idea twice in the previous year. Celeste had dismissed it the first time as unnecessary and the second time as something people did when they wanted a stranger to declare them right. I admitted I should have pushed the conversation earlier, when there was still more goodwill in the room. My mother didn't absolve me or blame me; she just said it was possible to regret how you handled a problem and still know the problem had become too large to live with.
On the drive home, I passed a neighborhood of modest two-story houses with porch lights coming on as the sky turned dark. A couple stood in one driveway holding a ladder while another person untangled string lights from a plastic storage tub. It wasn't anything remarkable, and perhaps that was why I had to pull over for a minute. For four years I had imagined Celeste and me doing those ordinary things in a place we owned. The loss wasn't only the person I thought I was married to; it was the version of our future I'd been repairing in my head every time something between us broke.