Chapter 1 — I Want a Divorce

“I want a divorce.”

Zachary froze with his fork halfway to his mouth and looked at me as though I had suddenly begun speaking a language he had never heard.

“What did you say?” His forehead creased in complete disbelief.

I pulled Chloe, our four-year-old daughter, tighter against my chest.

“I want to divorce you,” I said again, keeping my voice level.

Across the table, Tristan — the son Zachary had with his first wife — broke into a delighted grin.

“Yeah, get a divorce, Dad!

Then Charlotte can leave and my mom can come back.”

“Eat your food and stop talking,” Zachary snapped at him.

But Tristan was thirteen, and full of the easy confidence of a child who has never once been made to face a consequence, and he only chuckled.

“It’d be better.

If the mean lady goes, my mom could come live here again.”

The mean lady. Five years I had been married to Zachary, and in five years Tristan had never called me Mom.

He did not even trouble himself to call me Charlotte.

To him I was hey, or that one, or, when he was in a temper, the mean lady. And in five years, Zachary had never once corrected him.

I do not want you to think I minded, at first, that a grieving boy did not call me Mom.

I did not.