My Husband Dumped Me to Marry My Sister

Bryan comes over on a Tuesday now too. Four nights a week has become the new normal, though nobody's said it out loud. I'm at the sink scraping plates when I hear his voice climb over the TV static.

"Bro, you could be running a fund right now. Instead you're coming home to..." He doesn't finish the sentence. He doesn't have to.

There's a pause. Then Dorian laughs. Low. Easy. The kind of laugh you give when someone says something true and you don't want to admit it.

He does not correct him.

I stand there with a plate in one hand and the sponge in the other, water running over my knuckles, and I wait to feel something sharp. It doesn't come. What comes instead is quieter and worse — a kind of settling, like a stone finding the bottom of a lake it's been sinking toward for months.

I finish the dishes. I dry my hands on the towel hanging from the oven door. I do not come out.

That night, after Bryan leaves and the apartment goes still, Dorian's phone buzzes on the nightstand. He's already half-asleep, or pretending to be. I watch the screen light up the ceiling in a pale blue wash.

It's a photo. Cataleya, backless dress, the Grant sapphires at her throat, the skyline behind her lit up like something out of a magazine. *Wish you were here instead of whoever you're stuck with tonight.*

Dorian doesn't move for a long moment. I watch him through my lashes, my breathing slow and even, performing sleep the way I've gotten good at performing so many things. He stares at the photo. A full minute, maybe more. Then he deletes the thread.

He doesn't block her number.

He sets the phone face-down and lies back in the dark beside me. My hands are curled under my chin, cracked at the knuckles, and he doesn't reach for them. He never does anymore. I keep my eyes closed and let the silence between us do what it's been doing for months now — widen.

The next afternoon I go to the store. Chicken thighs are on sale, ninety-nine cents a pound, and I think about the fried chicken Dorian used to ask for on bad days, back when bad days were something we survived together. I buy buttermilk. I buy the good paprika, not the store brand. I want, one more time, to make something he'll actually eat at the table across from me.

I come home twenty minutes earlier than usual. The elevator's fast today. I balance the bags on my hip and I'm reaching for my keys when I hear his voice through the door.

Bright. Animated. A voice I haven't heard aimed at me in a long time.

I stop. The bags dig into my forearm. Through the thin wall, his voice carries like he's rehearsed this — like he's said it before, maybe to a mirror, maybe to Bryan a dozen times already.

"...file for divorce first, obviously, that's clean, that's simple. Then I take my time with Cataleya, no rush, let her think it's her idea. Her father's got that VC arm — one word from her and I'm not doing quarterly projections for some mid-level nobody anymore."

Bryan's voice, tinny through the phone speaker. "She's dead weight, bro. Always has been. You're about to level up."

Dorian laughs. Full. Unburdened. A laugh I remember from our first year together, when we used to split a six-dollar pizza and call it a feast.

"I should've done this a year ago," he says. "I just felt bad, you know? Like kicking a dog."

I stand in the hallway. Four seconds. I count them, though I don't mean to — one, the bag handles cutting red lines into my palm; two, the chicken thighs sweating cold through the plastic; three, my own heartbeat, steady, steadier than I expect; four, the sound of my own key sliding into the lock.

I open the door.

Dorian's face drains white mid-sentence, phone still lifted, Bryan's tiny frozen face on the screen between us. I don't look at either of them. I walk past the couch, past the coffee table with its ring stains, into the kitchen, and I set the grocery bags down on the counter one at a time. Slow. Careful. The chicken thighs. The buttermilk. The good paprika. I line them up like I'm still going to cook.

Then I straighten, and I turn, and I look at him.

"I'll see you at the courthouse Monday morning."

I say it the way I'd tell him dinner's ready. No heat in it. No tears. Just the truth, finally spoken out loud in a room where it can't be taken back.

His mouth opens. Nothing comes out.

I walk to the bedroom and close the door behind me, gently, the way you close a door on a room you don't plan to enter again. Through the wall, I hear the FaceTime call go silent — Bryan's voice cut off mid-syllable, the screen probably gone black in Dorian's shaking hand.

I sit on the edge of the bed. My hands are steady. I look down at them — red, cracked, mine — and for the first time in three years, I don't think about what they can make for someone else.