He Saved His Ex, So I Buried Our Marriage

The soup was rich, the lotus root melting and tender, the ribs falling clean off the bone. My mother's cooking, down to the last drop.

“Mom,” I said, two spoonfuls in, setting the bowl down. “Cliff and I are probably getting a divorce.”

Her spoon clattered against the table.

“What did you just say?”

I told her everything.

Phyllis coming back to the country. The crash. Cliff choosing to save her first. The baby gone. My uterus, removed.

I was calm the whole time, like I was telling someone else's story.

When I finished, my mother was quiet for a long time.

Then she stood up, walked to the window, and turned her back to me.

I could see her shoulders shaking.

“Mom.”

“Mm.” Her voice came out muffled.

“Don't cry.”

“I'm not.”

She turned around. Her eyes were red, but she really wasn't crying. She walked back, sat down again, and pushed the soup bowl toward me.

“Finish it.”

I drank the whole bowl.

She gathered the dishes and stood up, saying she'd go wash them. At the doorway she paused.

“Chrissy,” she said, “all I care about is whether you're okay. Nothing else matters.”

“I know.”

She left.

I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling.

The heart monitor beeped on. Sunlight from the window had shifted onto the wall, falling across a cheap landscape print. A field of sunflowers, bright gold, almost gaudy with color.

I thought of the row of books on the top shelf of Cliff's bookcase. All of them Phyllis's—architecture and design. He'd studied finance. He would never read a single one of those books in his life.

But he kept them.

Kept them when he moved into my place. Kept them when we changed apartments. Three years, and he hadn't gotten rid of one.

Meanwhile, the wedding photo I'd put on his desk had been tucked into a drawer.

Not thrown away. Tucked away.

He probably thought that counted as respect.

That afternoon, the nurse came to change my dressing. When she peeled back the gauze, I looked down at the scar on my stomach.

Long and red, like a centipede crawled across my skin.

“It's healing nicely,” the nurse said. “A few more days and the stitches can come out.”

“Okay.”

“Your husband not visiting today?”

“No.”

She glanced at me, then didn't ask anything else. She finished the dressing, pulled the blanket back over me, and left.

I picked up my phone.

I had to scroll a long way down to find Cliff's name. Our last exchange was three days ago. He'd asked “How are you feeling today” and I'd replied “Fine”.

I scrolled up. It was all the same.

“Coming home for dinner?” “Not tonight.”

“Movie this weekend?” “Working.”

“Do you remember my birthday?” “Yeah.”

That last one was mine. He'd answered “Yeah”.

I wasn't even sure he actually remembered.

I closed the thread and scrolled through Instagram.

Phyllis had posted something new.

A photo of a coffee cup. Floor-to-ceiling windows behind it, sunlight falling across the rim, casting a long shadow.

The caption read：“It's good to be home.”

Cliff had liked it.

I stared at that like for a long time.

He had never liked a single thing I posted. He saw all of them—I knew because he'd occasionally mention something from one. But he never once hit like.

I used to think he just didn't care for that kind of thing.

Turns out he just didn't care for me.

I turned off my phone, rolled over, and faced the wall.

The wall was white, clean, and completely bare.

I stared at it and tried to figure out what I'd done wrong.