“Come to my wedding with Claire and bring our daughters. Oh, and your invitation does include a +1, but we all know perfectly well you don’t have anyone.”
That’s the text my ex-husband, Max, sent me on a Tuesday night in April.
I was standing at the kitchen sink with my hands in dishwater when my phone buzzed on the counter. I dried one hand on my jeans and picked it up and read it.
Then I read it again.
Then I set the phone face down on the counter, very carefully, like it was something that might go off, and finished washing the dishes.
I scrubbed the same pot for about ten minutes.
My ten-year-old, Ava, was doing homework at the kitchen table. She looked up at me.
“Mom? Are you okay? You’re scrubbing really hard.”
“I’m fine, sweetheart.”
“Is it Dad?”
I didn’t answer. That was answer enough.
She looked back down at her math worksheet, and I saw her jaw get tight, the same way mine does.
Ten years old, and she already knew what that face meant.
God, I was so tired of him constantly walking all over me.
My name is Hannah Brooks. I’m thirty-eight years old. I’m a school librarian at Lincoln Middle School, which means I spend my days recommending books to twelve-year-olds who tell me they hate reading and then come back three days later asking for the sequel.
I was married to Max for almost thirteen years.
We met in college. He was a business major. Loud, funny, the kind of guy who walked into a party and everybody turned around. I was the quiet girl in the corner with a paperback in her purse. He sat down next to me and asked what I was reading. It was Jane Eyre.
He said he’d never read it. I told him he should. He said he’d read it if I went out with him.
He never read it.
But I went out with him anyway.
We got married when I was twenty-five. Ava came three years later. Then, after a long gap and two miscarriages I still don’t like to talk about, June came. She’s three now. She has Max’s curly hair and my stubbornness and she thinks the word “banana” is the funniest thing in the world.
