My Husband Left Me for His Sick Mistress

I heard about Arabella from Savannah, who heard it from someone at the Kelly Group's PR firm, who mentioned it the way people mention weather — casually, as though it wasn't a grenade.

She had moved into the guest suite. Temporarily, the word going around said. Due to her condition.

I was sitting at my desk when Savannah told me. I kept my eyes on my screen. I clicked through three emails I didn't read.

'Temporarily,' Savannah repeated, her voice doing the thing it does when she is deciding how loudly to be angry. 'In his apartment. Where you still legally live.'

'I'm aware of where I live.'

'Raya.'

'I'm handling it,' I said.

She let it sit for a moment. Then: 'Okay.'

She didn't believe me. She was right not to.

I thought about the guest bathroom. The one with the rainfall showerhead Dutton had installed two years ago because I mentioned once, offhand, that I liked them. I thought about someone else's toiletries on that shelf. Someone else's silk robe on the hook behind the door. I thought about Arabella Watson standing in Dutton's kitchen in the morning, barefoot, like a woman who had always been there and was only now letting herself be seen.

I pressed my thumb to my wrist and went back to my emails.

***

I packed on a Tuesday. I did it the way I do most things — methodically, without ceremony. Two suitcases. The ones I had arrived with.

The closet took less time than I expected. Two years of a life, and most of it wasn't mine to begin with. The penthouse had come furnished. The art was Dutton's. The kitchen was Dutton's. The view of the park, the marble floors, the particular quality of silence that expensive buildings have — all of it had always belonged to him. I had only ever been a guest who forgot to act like one.

I took my books. I took the coffee mug from the kitchen cabinet — the plain white one I'd bought myself at a drugstore on Lexington because the set Dutton owned felt too heavy in my hands. I took the photograph from behind my phone case and held it for a moment before I put it in the front pocket of my carry-on, where I could not see it accidentally.

I did not leave a note. There was nothing to say that the empty closet didn't say better.

The elevator came. I stepped in with my two suitcases and my books in a tote bag and my coffee mug wrapped in a sweater so it wouldn't break. The doors closed on the penthouse and I watched the floor numbers count down and I did not look up at the mirrored ceiling.

I did not cry in the lobby. I did not cry in the car.

I pressed my thumb to my wrist the whole way to Brooklyn and watched the bridge cables pass overhead like the bars of something I was finally on the right side of.

***

The apartment was small and smelled like fresh paint and someone else's cleaning products. The living room had one window that faced a brick wall and floors that creaked in the same spot every time. I stood in the middle of it with my two suitcases and my tote bag and my wrapped coffee mug and I thought: this is mine.

All of it. The creaking floor and the brick view and the smell. Mine.

I sat down against the wall because there was no furniture yet, and I called Savannah.

She picked up on the second ring. 'Where are you.'

'Brooklyn. I moved out.'

A pause. Then: 'I'm coming. Don't move.'

'Savannah, you don't have to —'

But she had already hung up.

She arrived in forty minutes. She had two bags of takeout from the Thai place on my old block, a bottle of wine tucked under her arm, and her phone in her hand with the screen already lit.

She looked at me sitting on the floor. She looked at the two suitcases. She sat down beside me without a word, set the food between us, and put the wine back in the bag.

'You're not drinking,' she said. It wasn't a question.

'No.'

She nodded once. She didn't ask why. Savannah is the only person I know who understands that some questions are doors, and that sometimes the kindest thing is to leave them closed.

We ate pad thai on the floor of my empty apartment. The city made its sounds outside the window. A bus. Someone's music two floors up. The particular percussion of a place that doesn't know you yet and doesn't care.

'I have something,' Savannah said, after a while. She held up her phone. 'I've been adding to it for about eight months. I'm going to read it to you.'

'What is it.'

'It's a list.' She cleared her throat with great formality. 'Title: Things Dutton Kelly Can Go Do.' She looked at me over the phone. 'There are fourteen entries.'

I looked at her.

'Entry one,' she said. 'He can go do a full restructuring of his entire personality, starting with the part that thinks showing up with his coat still on counts as a conversation.'

Something shifted in my chest. A small, rusty thing.

'Entry two. He can go do a very long think about why his assistant smells like his cologne, and then he can go do whatever comes after that think, preferably somewhere I don't have to hear about it.'

The small rusty thing cracked open.

'Entry three —'

I laughed.

It came out wrong at first, too sharp, like something that had been held in too long. But then it came again, and it was real. It filled the empty room and bounced off the walls and Savannah looked at me with an expression I hadn't seen on her face in weeks — relief, pure and uncomplicated.

'There she is,' she said quietly.

I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth. My eyes were wet. I didn't know when that had happened.

'Keep going,' I said.

She kept going.

We sat on the floor of my empty apartment until the food was gone and the list was finished and the city outside had settled into its late-night register. My back ached from the wall. My face felt strange from laughing, like a muscle I had forgotten I had.

I laid my hand flat on my stomach in the dark, the way I had in the penthouse bathroom with the test stick still in my hand.

'Hi,' I said, very quietly, so only I could hear it.

Savannah was scrolling her phone and didn't look up.

The floor creaked in the same spot when I shifted my weight. The brick wall sat outside the window, patient and indifferent.

Mine.