Part 3
Patricia’s office smelled faintly of citrus cleaner and expensive coffee. It was on the second floor of a brick building downtown, and the waiting room had a framed print of a sailboat that looked like it had been chosen to offend no one. I sat in a chair that was too soft and stared at the sailboat while my hands twisted in my lap.
When Patricia came out to greet me, she was exactly as I remembered: sharp-eyed, mid-fifties, hair cut in a clean bob that suggested she didn’t waste time. She shook my hand firmly and led me into her office, where a leather portfolio lay open on her desk like a mouth ready to swallow my life.
“Tell me what’s going on,” she said.
So I did. Not the whole history—no one can pour thirty-seven years into a single conversation—but the core of it. The overheard therapy session. Graham’s words. The performance. The decades.
Patricia listened without interrupting. She took notes, her pen moving steadily, her face unreadable in the way good lawyers cultivate.
When I finished, she set the pen down and looked at me directly. “You’ve been married thirty-seven years,” she said. “That means this is significant asset division. Do you own the house jointly?”
“Yes,” I said. “We also have retirement accounts, pensions. Everything is… braided together.”
“Do you have reason to believe he’ll be adversarial?” she asked.
I thought of Graham’s face in the hallway, that sagging defeat. “No,” I said. “He might try to talk me out of it, but I don’t think he’ll fight legally.”
Patricia nodded once. “Sometimes the people who avoid emotional conflict are also the ones who avoid legal conflict. They’ll sign papers faster than they’ll have a hard conversation.”
The accuracy of that landed like a small punch.
“Does he know you’re considering divorce?” she asked.
“He knows he’s not welcome in the house,” I said. “I assume he can connect the dots.”
Patricia’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “Men are often surprisingly bad at connecting dots,” she said. “We’ll draft a letter of intent. That makes it explicit.”
She slid a checklist across the desk. “We’ll need to catalog all shared assets,” she continued. “Bank accounts, retirement, pensions, vehicles, the house. Any investments. Any debts.”
I stared at the checklist and felt a strange calm. Numbers. Categories. Items. It was a language I could use to build a new reality.
Patricia watched me carefully. “I want to ask you something,” she said. “Not as your lawyer, but as a person. Are you certain?”
I thought about my research. About the studies showing that people in unfulfilling marriages carried stress like a chronic illness, that emotional deprivation didn’t just make you sad—it wore down your body. I thought about how I’d preached authenticity to students while living in a marriage where honesty had apparently been optional.
I also thought about the word reliable, and how it had made me feel small.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m certain.”
Patricia nodded. “All right,” she said. “Then we proceed.”
The letter arrived at Graham’s temporary apartment—he’d moved into a furnished one near his brother, he told the boys—three days later. Patricia emailed me a copy as well, and when I opened it, I felt a jolt of disorientation. Seeing my life translated into legal language made it seem both brutally real and strangely distant.
Initiation of divorce proceedings.
Irretrievable breakdown.
Division of assets.
As if love, or the absence of it, could be sorted into clauses.
Graham called me immediately after receiving it. His name lit up my phone screen, and I stared at it until it stopped ringing. Then it rang again. I answered on the second call because I didn’t want him to call the boys and pull them into it.
“Diane,” he said, and his voice was strained. “I got the letter.”
“Yes,” I said.
There was a long exhale. “If this is what you want, I won’t fight you,” he said. He sounded like he was offering me a favor.
“It’s not what I wanted,” I said, and my voice surprised me with its steadiness. “What I wanted was a husband who actually loved me.”
Silence.
“What we have,” I continued, because stopping felt like letting him off the hook, “is a husband who stayed for convenience. So, yes, this is what I’m choosing.”
He made a small sound, like he’d been struck. “I never meant—”
“I know,” I said, and the bitterness rose up. “You never meant anything. That’s the point.”
We didn’t argue. Graham wasn’t built for arguments. He said he would cooperate. I told him all communication should go through Patricia if it was about legal matters. He agreed too quickly, like he was grateful for the structure.
The divorce process was remarkably efficient when both parties cooperate. That sentence still shocks me when I say it. I had imagined divorce as a messy, dramatic unraveling, full of screaming and slammed doors and sobbing calls to friends. Instead, it was spreadsheets, signatures, and polite emails.
Patricia and Graham’s lawyer—an older man named Ron who looked like he’d been born in a suit—negotiated the division. Fifty-fifty. No drama. No hidden accounts. Graham kept his pension. I kept mine. We split the savings. We agreed to sell the house.
That was the one point where I almost faltered. Not because I wanted the house, but because the idea of leaving it felt like erasing proof that my life had been real.
The house in New Edinburgh had been our biggest joint project. We’d bought it in 1994, when the boys were still small, when our careers were rising and the future felt like a bright, uncharted road. We’d painted the living room ourselves, Graham on the ladder, me holding the tray, both of us laughing when paint dripped on his hair. We’d planted the backyard maple tree the year Marcus was born. We’d hosted holidays, celebrated birthdays, built a thousand small memories into the walls.
But I couldn’t bear the idea of living there alone, walking past the sunroom every day like it was a scar. And I couldn’t bear the idea of Graham living there either, inhabiting our shared history like it still belonged to him.
So we listed it.
The realtor came through with her bright smile and staged language. “Such good light,” she said, gesturing toward the sunroom. “A perfect space for morning coffee.”
I stood behind her and felt like laughing, because I’d been standing in that same light when my marriage died.
The house sold in eight days. Ottawa real estate, even in autumn, moves fast. On the day we signed the final papers, I went back one last time alone. The new owners hadn’t moved in yet. The rooms were empty, echoing.
In the sunroom, the wicker loveseat was gone, leaving a pale square on the floor where it had sat. I stood in the center of the room and let myself feel it all at once: grief, rage, relief, exhaustion. I pressed my hand against the glass window and watched my reflection stare back at me.
“This is real,” I whispered to myself. “This happened.”
Then I turned away and walked out.
With my portion of the sale, I bought a small townhouse in the Glebe, close enough to campus that I could walk to work, far enough from New Edinburgh that my old life wouldn’t ambush me on familiar streets. It had a tiny backyard garden and a narrow staircase that made me puff when I climbed it. It was imperfect and mine.
The boys took it hard in their own ways. Colin wanted to fix things. He came over with takeout and earnest eyes and said, “You’ve been together forever. People go through rough patches. You can fix this.”
I looked at my son—grown, kind, still carrying a child’s belief that parents are stable structures—and felt my heart crack again.
“How do you fix three decades of pretending?” I asked him quietly. “How do you fix a foundation that was never solid?”
Colin’s eyes filled. He looked away quickly, like he hated himself for crying.
Marcus was quieter. He helped me move boxes, hung curtains, assembled shelves with the patient focus he’d had since he was a boy building Lego sets. When we finished, he stood in my new living room and looked around.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “I know this wasn’t what you planned.”
“No,” I said, and I surprised myself by smiling faintly. “But maybe that’s okay. Maybe plans change.”
That night, after the boys left, I sat on the floor of my new living room surrounded by half-unpacked boxes and listened to the silence. It was different than the silence in the old house. This silence wasn’t haunted. It was open.
I didn’t feel happy. Not yet. But I felt something else, something that made my chest expand with cautious possibility.
For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t performing anything.
