I sat on the edge of the bed and watched him fold his shirts into a suitcase.
“The girls,” I said. “What about the girls?”
“I’ll see them on weekends. I’m not a monster.”
He zipped the suitcase. He looked around the bedroom like he was checking for anything he forgot.
At the door, he turned around.
“Honestly, Hannah,” he said, “this might be good for you. Maybe you’ll finally take care of yourself.”
Then he left.
I sat on the bed for a long time.
Then I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror.
He was right. I hadn’t really looked in a long time. I’d brush my teeth and pull my hair back and walk away. I didn’t look at my face. I didn’t
look at my body.
I looked now.
I saw a tired woman with dark circles under her eyes and gray coming in at her temples and a soft stomach under an old T-shirt. I saw stretch marks on my hips like little silver rivers.
I saw a woman nobody would ever want again.
I sobbed so hard I had to sit down on the bathroom floor.
Ava found me there. She was eight then. She knelt down on the tile in her pajamas and put her arms around my neck and didn’t say anything.
I’ll never forget that. My eight-year-old holding me up on a bathroom floor.
The divorce took almost a year.
It was the hardest year of my life. I won’t lie about that.
There were lawyers and mediators and custody schedules. There were forms with words like “marital assets” and “equitable distribution” that I had to look
up. There were nights I lay awake staring at the ceiling, doing math, trying to figure out if I could keep the house on a librarian’s salary.
I couldn’t. I sold it. I moved the girls into a two-bedroom rental on Elm Street with a tiny backyard and a kitchen faucet that drips no matter what you do to it.
