Divorcing My Cheating Husband

The glass hit the doorframe and the world exploded into white.

I didn't have time to flinch. One second I was raising my hand to knock, the next the bourbon bottle shattered six inches from my face and the spray of glass was everywhere—in my hair, across my cheek, one shard catching me just above my eyebrow with a sting so sharp it stole my breath.

Warm. That was the first thing I registered. The blood was warm as it slid down the side of my face, faster than I expected, threading into my eyelashes and blurring the left half of my vision into a smeared, red-tinged blur.

I stumbled. My shoulder caught the doorframe and I went down hard, one knee cracking against the hallway floor, my clutch skidding away into the dark.

"After what you pulled tonight?" Frank's voice came from somewhere above me, the words running together the way they always did when he was past the point of reason. "You ruined everything. Everything I had with him—gone. Because of you."

I blinked blood out of my eye and looked up.

Fiona was behind him. She'd appeared from the kitchen doorway, a dish towel in her hands, wearing the same expression she always wore when Frank got like this—not horror, not concern. Just calculation. She was twenty-six and she'd been living here for eight months, and she had learned very quickly which way the wind blew in this apartment.

She made no move toward me.

Frank stepped over the threshold, looming. "You think you can just blow up your marriage and it doesn't affect anyone else? He's been keeping this family—"

"The necklace," I said.

My voice came out steadier than I deserved. I pressed two fingers to the cut above my eyebrow and pushed myself upright against the doorframe, legs unsteady beneath me.

"Mom's necklace. That's all I came for."

Something shifted in his face. A flicker—quick, almost imperceptible—and then his hand moved to his shirt pocket. He'd already taken it. He'd had it ready before he opened the door.

He pulled it out and held it up between two fingers. The small silver locket caught the yellow kitchen light, turning slowly on its chain. Inside that tiny glass vial was everything that was left of my mother. The last physical thing she'd asked me to have.

"Give me that," I said.

"Come and get it."

I moved before I finished thinking. My body just went—crossed the distance between us in two steps and grabbed for his wrist. He was bigger than me and drunk and mean, but I had three years of swallowing everything I felt and I was done swallowing.

My fingernails dug into the back of his hand. Deep. I felt the skin give and I didn't let go.

He made a sound of surprise and pain and tried to shake me off, but I held on, clawing, my vision still half-red from the blood dripping into my eye. He slammed his elbow into my shoulder and I lost my grip and we both lurched sideways into the hallway wall.

The locket hit the floor.

The chain snapped.

The glass vial cracked against the baseboards and the ash inside—gray and pale and impossibly fine—scattered across the grimy linoleum in a small, silent cloud.

I stopped breathing.

For a moment, neither of us moved. Even Frank went still, staring down at it.

Then he stepped back and pulled out his phone.

"What are you doing," I said. It wasn't a question. My voice had gone flat.

"What I should've done an hour ago." He was already dialing. "Kade's been waiting for proof that you've finally cracked. I'd say this qualifies."

The call connected on the second ring. He put it on speaker without hesitation, and Kade's voice filled the narrow hallway like smoke filling a room.

"Tell me something useful, Patrick."

Frank held the phone toward me like a weapon. "Your wife is bleeding on my floor. Came here making threats. Destroyed her mother's ashes."

"I didn't—" My jaw clenched. "He dropped it. He—"

"Ivy." Kade's voice was almost gentle. Almost. "Come home. We can forget tonight happened. All of it."

I looked at the ash on the floor. The broken chain. The cracked glass catching the light.

"No," I said.

A pause. Then the warmth drained out of his voice entirely.

"Make her crawl, Patrick," Kade said. The words were calm and deliberate and utterly without feeling. "Until she begs, she's dead to me."

Frank ended the call and pocketed the phone. He looked at me with something I recognized from childhood—not anger anymore, just the cold satisfaction of a man who believed he'd already won.

"You heard him," Frank said.

He moved toward me.

I didn't have anywhere to go. The hallway was narrow and my back was already against the wall and my legs were shaking in a way I was trying very hard not to let show. The blood had slowed above my eyebrow but my eye was still sticky with it, and the world kept trying to tilt sideways.

I did the only thing left to do.

I sank to my knees.

Not for Frank. Not for Kade. I dropped down because the ash was there, scattered across the dirty floor, and I was not leaving this hallway without every grain of it I could recover.

I pressed my palms flat against the linoleum and started gathering it. There was glass mixed in—small, nearly invisible slivers—and I felt the first cut immediately, a thin slice across my ring finger. Then another across my palm. I kept going.

"What are you—" Frank's voice faltered. Something about it seemed to unsettle even him.

"Mom," I whispered. Just her name. Just to say it.

My hands were trembling. Blood from my finger was mixing with the ash, and I couldn't tell anymore what was what, and I kept going anyway, cupping my palms together, trying to hold onto what was left of her.

Frank's shadow fell over me. I heard him pull back his arm.

I closed my eyes.

The footsteps from the stairwell were quiet. Expensive shoes make almost no sound on concrete—I know that now. I only registered them because the hallway had gone so completely still.

They stopped directly in front of my hands.

Black leather. Custom-made. The kind of shoes that cost more than three months of my father's rent.

A voice came from above me, low and unhurried, carrying the particular weight of someone who had never once in their life needed to raise it to be heard.

"I'd stop there if I were you."

It wasn't directed at me.