She wasn't angry. She wasn't heartbroken. She wasdone.
He'd never seen her like that. He had never once seen Charlotte look at him without warmth. The warmth was gone. Dominic understood dimly, distantly, in a place he wasn't yet ready to access, that warmth like Charlotte's didn't come back once you'd killed it.
CHAPTER 7
CHARLOTTE
The first week was the worst.
After Kate’s, Charlotte went back to her parents' house in Whitestone, Queens, the same three-bedroom where she'd grown up. Her childhood bedroom had been converted into a sewing room, but her mother cleared the fabric off the twin bed, put fresh sheets on it and didn't ask questions. Her father hovered in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, looking like he wanted to hit someone but didn't know the address.
"You need anything, honey?”
"I'm okay, Dad."
"Because I can go over there and?—"
"Dad. I'm okay."
He nodded. Hovered for another moment. Then went to the kitchen and made her coffee the way he made her mother coffee, every morning, without being asked, for thirty-one years. Charlotte held the mug and thought about her vows and didn't cry, because she'd used up everything she had on Kate's couch and there was nothing left. Just a dry, scraped-out space behind her ribs where the feeling used to be.
Dominic called multiple times the first day. She watched his name pulse on her screen, let each call ring through to voicemail, and then blocked his number. The silence after was enormous. She kept picking up her phone and staring at the blank screen, her thumb hovering over the place where his name used to appear, and then setting it down again.
He switched to email. Three messages in two days. She read the first one:Charlotte, I understand you need space, but I need you to know that what happened was not what it looked like— and deleted it before she reached the second paragraph. She deleted the other two without opening them. Then she blocked that address too.
Flowers arrived at her parents' home. White peonies. Her favorite, because she'd told him once and he'd filed it somewhere useful, the way he filed everything. The card read:Please let me explain. — D.Her mother brought them upstairs with a look on her face that was trying very hard to be neutral. Charlotte stared at them for a long time. Then she dropped them in the garbage can.
A car service showed up. Black sedan, tinted windows, the same company Dominic used to send for her. The driver came to the door:Mr. Weston has arranged transportation whenever you're ready to talk.Charlotte told him that she wasn't ready and would never be, and could he please tell Mr. Weston to stop sending things to her parents' home. The driver left. She stood in the hallway with her forehead against the wall and breathed until her hands stopped trembling.
Kate came every evening. She'd show up after school with takeout and a bag of papers to grade. They'd sit on Charlotte's twin bed with containers of lo mein balanced on textbooks, and Kate would talk about her day. Which kid threw up during art, which parent sent an unhinged email about the science fair. Charlotte would listen and nod and sometimes laugh, and thelaughing was like finding a muscle she'd forgotten she had. Sore from disuse but still there.
"He sent a letter to the school," Kate told her one evening, chopsticks paused midair.
Charlotte looked up. "What?"
"Handwritten. Addressed to you, care of P.S. 34. Linda from the front office brought it to my room because she didn't know if you'd want it."
"What did you do with it?"
"I put it in my desk drawer. Do you want it?"
"No."
Kate nodded. Ate another bite. "He came by my apartment again last night. Sat in his car outside for an hour."
Charlotte closed her eyes. She could picture it. Dominic in his dark sedan, engine idling, staring up at Kate's window, running calculations. Trying to find the angle that would unlock this, the strategy that would bring her back to the negotiating table. He didn't understand that there was no table. The table was gone.
"Did you talk to him?"
"I went downstairs and told him if he came back I'd call the police. He looked at me like I'd suggested something unreasonable." Kate shook her head. "He really thinks this is a problem he can solve."
"That's what I was to him," Charlotte said. "A problem he solved. He wanted a wife, I was the solution, and now the solution is malfunctioning and he can't figure out why."
Kate was quiet for a moment. "Charlie. Do you really believe that? That none of it was real?"
Charlotte picked at her lo mein. Did she believe it? She turned the question over and over, and the answer kept shifting. There were moments: the rooftop, the peonies, the way he'd looked at her during her vows with that unguarded fracture in his composure that felt genuine. That felt like a man catchinga glimpse of something he hadn't expected to see. But then she'd remember the thumbs-up emoji, the earrings with no card, the phone calls he stepped out to take. The relationship she'd poured herself into while he managed it from a distance, like a project that was proceeding on schedule.
"I think parts of it were real," she said. "I think he almost loved me. And I think almost is worse than nothing."
