It was 3:00 AM when my husband texted me.
[Where are you?]
I sat in the recovery room of the women’s health center, too drained from the pain to type much.
[We’ll talk when I get home.]
When I walked through the door, James was at his computer, diligently editing a video from a party.
“I ended the pregnancy.,” I said. “And I’m being transferred overseas the day after tomorrow. Take tomorrow off so we can go to Maple County Courthouse and finalize the divorce.”
He didn’t even look up. He just hummed a vague, absent-minded response.
I knew instantly—he had turned his hearing aid off again.
For six years, I used to chatter away, sharing every mundane detail of my day with him. I had eagerly planned our future together. I must have sung over three hundred love songs to him over the years, and in the end, not a single lyric ever truly reached his ears.
I was so incredibly tired.
I walked up behind him and flicked the switch on his hearing device.
He frowned, immediately turning defensive before I could speak. “What are you doing? The battery is low, and I left my charger at the office. I’m taking tomorrow off to go to The Starlight Lounge with Chloe to hear her sing. Don’t waste my battery.”
I nodded and switched it back off for him. Let’s just part in silence, then.
…
A moment later, James switched the device back on himself.
“Forget it. I’ll just grab the charger from the office tomorrow morning. What did you want to say?”
I didn’t answer. I walked over to the sofa, sat down, and dry-swallowed the painkillers the doctor had prescribed with a sip of cold water.
James finally looked away from his screen, glancing at me. “Why are you taking pills?”
“Vitamins,” I lied.
He nodded. “Did the doctor say anything? I would have gone to the hospital with you if I wasn’t so busy today.”
It was always like this.
James had zero credibility left with me. Like our last vacation—he promised he’d take me to the coast. I booked the flights, planned the itinerary, and then Chloe claimed some “creepy guy” was following her home from work. James threw a lump sum of cash at me to brush me off, and spent his entire month of PTO acting as her personal bodyguard.
I could overlook a canceled trip. But he applied the exact same disappearing act to my birthdays and our wedding anniversaries.
Whenever I asked, it was always because “Chloe had an emergency.”
He never took my words seriously. Half the time, he couldn’t even be bothered to listen. But the moment Chloe spun some bizarre, dramatic excuse, he treated it like a royal decree.
For the longest time, I didn’t understand it. We were all adults; how could he lack such basic judgment?
It was only later I realized it had nothing to do with whether he believed her or not. It was simply a matter of who he loved. When a man loves someone, she could call the sky the ground and the grass red, and he would still bend over backward to turn her nonsense into absolute truth.
“Never mind. Let’s just go to sleep,” I said. “At your last physical, the doctor said your thyroid nodules were growing. He told you to stop staying up late—”
Before he even finished his sentence, James switched his hearing aid off again. He waved a hand, gesturing for me to leave him alone.
I suddenly laughed. I laughed at my own knee-jerk reaction. After all these years, I was still hardwired to care about him.
I walked into the master bedroom and locked the door behind me. By the time I finished filling out my overseas transfer paperwork, it was 6:00 AM. The sky was bleeding from pitch black to pale gray.
Outside in the living room, the clacking of the keyboard had been replaced by the sound of a voice call. Even through a locked wooden door and the phone’s speaker, I could hear Chloe’s booming voice.
And there was James, patiently listening to her plan out her itinerary for the day.
I buried my head under the covers and let the exhaustion pull me under.
