That was how the day was going to be.
I showered. I dressed. I tied my hair back. Then I went into the guest room closet, pulled out boxes, and started packing Ethan’s belongings with the same methodical precision I once used to assemble quarterly operations reports. Shirts folded. Books stacked. Electronics wrapped in spare towels. Toiletries bagged. Shoes paired. I labeled every box in black marker: clothes, books, electronics, office, miscellaneous. If he wanted to claim I had damaged anything, he’d have to do it against a level of order he had never once brought into our shared life.
As I packed, memory kept surfacing in ugly flashes.
Ethan laughing at dinner parties, charming everyone with that easy warmth that had once made me feel chosen.
Ethan kissing me in grocery store aisles while I held the list.
Ethan coming home from work tired and dropping onto the couch while I finished the dishes, and me telling myself that was fine because he had a stressful week.
Ethan saying Rebecca’s name months earlier in some offhand work story, his face turned away while he opened the fridge.
Rebecca.
Of course she was Rebecca. There had to be a Rebecca in stories like this—a woman with smooth hair and office-insider jokes and the kind of smile that says she does not think consequences apply to her because she has never yet been forced to pay one in full. I knew who she was, vaguely. Coworker. Marketing. Younger than me by maybe five or six years. Laugh too loud. Once, at a holiday party, she had complimented my earrings and then spent the rest of the night orbiting Ethan with the practiced innocence of a woman who wanted to be noticed without ever appearing to pursue attention. I had thought she was mildly annoying. I had not thought she was spending eight months in my marriage like a thief casing a house from the inside.
By one-thirty, every trace of Ethan that I could legally and safely remove was boxed and stacked in the garage. I left the wedding album upstairs in the linen closet. He hadn’t earned the right to make me touch it yet.
At 2 p.m., the doorbell rang.