Yesterday. The word struck me harder than anything else. Surgery yesterday. And she had been alone.

“Why didn’t you call me?” I asked, and hated how wounded I sounded the moment it left my mouth — as though I’d been the one abandoned.

Sophie looked at me for a long moment, then gave a small, tired smile that vanished almost at once. “You divorced me, Ethan.”

There was no anger in it. No accusation. Only fact. And somehow that made it hurt worse.

I looked down at my hands. Two months ago those hands had signed papers that turned my wife into someone I was no longer entitled to protect. No longer entitled to know.

No longer entitled to hold.