PART 1

After twenty-seven years of marriage, Frank told me I had “let myself go” and walked out for another woman. I thought he had taken my confidence with him, until three months later, I found a forgotten box in the garage that reminded me exactly who had kept our family standing.

That was Frank’s favorite dinner. For nearly three decades, every Thursday evening smelled of butter, rosemary, and garlic. I set the dish on the table and waited for him to do what he always did: loosen his tie, kiss my head, and say, “Smells good, Greta.”

But that night, he only stood by the chair and said, “I’m not hungry.”I turned from the counter. “Since when?”

He didn’t smile. “I don’t want dinner. And I don’t want this anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

Us,” he said. “I want a divorce.”

The oven ticked behind me while my hands tightened around the mitts.

“We’ve been married twenty-seven years,” I said.

“I know.”

“Then say it like that matters.”

He looked away, and I understood.

“Is there someone else?”

His silence answered before his mouth did.

“Her name is Brittany.”

She ran a mobile spa. He said she made him feel alive. She listened. She cared about herself. Then his eyes moved over my cardigan, my clipped-up hair, my short nails, and the burn mark on my wrist.

“Greta,” he said, “you let yourself go.”

I stared at him. “Where did I go, Frank? To your mother’s appointments? To the grocery store? To Atlas’s games? To Aria’s recitals? To the life you kept asking me to manage?”

He left that night with two suitcases and the leather jacket I had bought him for his fiftieth birthday.

By the end of the month, he had a rental across town, and our marriage was being divided by lawyers like it had only been paperwork.I wrapped the untouched chicken pot pie in foil because I didn’t know what else to do. Then I sat at the kitchen table until the candles burned low and the house stopped pretending it was whole.

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