Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage — Part IV

Part IV

Once they leave their summer home, ospreys use air currents to speed their flight down the coast, soaring over highways, lakes, and rivers. They cover hundreds of miles each day, thousands by the time they reach their final destination. The trip can be as short as a week or as long as a month.

During their journey, ospreys may encounter predators, storms, or hurricanes. These obstacles can blow them off course, slowing their progress, forcing them to take cover for several days. In some cases, the event is fatal.

—

As the kids settled into school, I decided to make the apartment more reflective of me, even though I wasn’t yet sure who that was. I knew I wanted to shed the spare aesthetic James and I had adopted together. I wanted the space to feel more feminine, warmer. I gave away his white desk and bought a new one in a warm, burled wood. I framed photographs of Lynn, my father, my grandparents. I hung watercolors of flowers Susan found in her basement. I ordered a bright green wallpaper with cranes and dragonflies for the small bathroom near the kitchen. I hung pale pink pendulum lights over our dinner table. James hated wallpaper, pendulum lights, and anything colorful.

While I added color to the apartment, I removed it from my wardrobe.

Charmaine, my brother’s wife, helped me go through my closet. She is the most stylish person I know, and the most fun. She was determined to get me to a better place, to make it all a bit less grim. I had hung the kids’ puffy winter parkas in the space where James’s suits had been. Charmaine took

them all out, carried them out of the room, and crammed them into the hall closet.

She said, “No kid clothes in here. This is Flo World now.”

We laughed, but it was a happy thought. All that space. A room of my own.

She said, “Now we’re going to turn you into a chic French divorcée.”

I laughed again. “Yes!” It was an image that appealed to me, rather than the matronly, discarded wife I’d been holding in my head.

I did not inherit my grandmother’s and mother’s innate style, their famous glamour. My family’s entries on the International Best Dressed List ended with me. I avoided the world in which fashion mattered, the women who dressed for society photographers. I was too shy for it. Until my thirties, I didn’t care about clothes at all. But in my new state, I could see how clothing could help me forge an identity, one that I liked.

Charmaine and I made a pile of clothes to sell. We got rid of anything floral, anything patterned, anything dowdy. And everything that was now too big. She organized my closets, including those taken over from James, in neat rows, the clothes mostly black, navy, gray, white, cream. We tried different outfits and she took photos. She encouraged me to wear shorter skirts and higher heels (but not together). It felt like a huge gift, her helping me to redefine myself, at least on the outside.

But I had almost nowhere to go. With COVID rates still high, there were very few invitations, very few gatherings. I saw my friends now and then, for increasingly cold dinners outside, or for a walk on the Hudson River, and the kids were with me—appearing at dinner, making smoothies in the kitchen, taking showers in my bathroom. But they always ended up in their rooms, their doors closed. I no longer had the noise and chaos of a dozen teenagers coming and going. It was so quiet.

A deep loneliness set in, reminiscent of how I felt in my childhood home. I told myself a story about being alone: the rest of the world, including James, was coupled; James had proven that I was unlovable by leaving me; I would always be alone. This story wrapped around me, through me, like a snake.

—

In late October, I was invited to a dinner party at a town house uptown. I was happy to be included, to have something to do. I wore jeans, a thick navy sweater, new black ballerina flats. We sat at a table in the garden under heat lamps. It was chilly but not yet freezing. I was seated next to the handsome and charismatic host, whom I liked but didn’t know well. He was part of James’s tennis group.

As we settled into the meal, picking up our knives and forks, he said, “Boy, am I glad you’re getting divorced. I’m finally beating James at tennis.” He chuckled. “During our match last week, he took a call from you and came back so rattled, he lost. So thank you!”

James and I had not spoken on the phone since the night I had received the summons, and definitely not while he was playing tennis. I didn’t know how to answer. Was I meant to laugh? I smiled as warmly as I could and tried to reassure myself, He’s trying to break the ice. It’s okay.

Then he said, “I gave James the name of my divorce lawyer.” It was the name on the summons. He said, “He represents all the Goldman Sachs guys. He’s really tough. He’s going to keep you in court for years.” This man delivered these sentences lightly, like it wasn’t a big deal.

Is he trying to help me, telling me this so I can protect myself? Or is it a threat, delivered on behalf of James, to settle quickly or spend the next years of my life in litigation, getting crushed? Or is he just sharing facts that I should take in stride, like a man?

I tried to look busy eating my food while my cheeks burned red in the candlelight. A full-bodied fear rushed through me, a flood of awareness that, while I was navigating my days—walking the dog, making breakfast, checking homework—a deck was being stacked against me.

—

I made appointments with my dentist and my doctors. It felt like I had weathered a storm and I needed to be checked, healed, fixed.

My gynecologist was in Carnegie Hill. I’d started going to her two years before, when my obstetrician had retired. In her exam room, I took off my clothes, put on a hospital gown, stood on the scale, and sat on the table, the paper crinkling under me. The doctor walked in and we had the routine conversation about my health (fine), whether I was in menopause (not yet).

I told her about James leaving. I told her I’d been under a lot of stress. She said she was sorry to hear it. She didn’t comment on my weight loss.

She examined my breasts and abdomen. I put my legs in the stirrups.

She put on her gloves and said, “You don’t work, right?” She put one hand inside me, the other on my stomach, pressing.

I winced from her probing. I said, “No, I’m a lawyer, I do pro bono cases, but nothing full-time. Nothing paid.”

She said, “You know, women become less interesting to men when they don’t work. It really has a negative impact on marriages. I’ve seen it a lot.”

She pulled her hand out from inside my body, removed her gloves, and tossed them in the garbage. She said my exam was normal and that I could call her for the Pap smear results in a few days. She left the room.

I got dressed as quickly as I could. My legs were shaking so much it was hard to put on my underwear, my jeans.

He left me because I wasn’t interesting enough? Because I’d stayed home with the kids?

Maybe this is why he picked the woman with the alliterative name, because she had a serious job?

My gynecologist would not be the only person to imply this over the next year. She was the most explicit, but other people, usually working women, floated the idea. It was an easy answer, one that may have made them feel better, like a guarantee: If you work, this won’t happen to you.

—

During the fall and winter, our divorce gathered steam. I had engaged a lawyer in the spring, at my family’s urging, but she was known as a mediator. Once James had hired the famously aggressive lawyer—the one

recommended by his tennis friend—several people told me I was “bringing a knife to a gunfight.” So, I hired a new lawyer, a woman, in November.

She was smart, elegant, maternal. And tough. I loved her as soon as I met her.

We appeared at hearings in the judge’s virtual courtroom—me at my new desk, James in his office in Nolita, looking up at the screen above his desk. We filed our financial statements, tax returns, statements of assets and expenses. All of it—every moment, every appearance, every exchange— hurt me. I took it all personally.

James’s demeanor was professional, remote. It felt like we were in a corporate transaction, on opposing sides, a stage with no emotion. But there was something else. I could see it in his eyes as I squinted at my computer screen: a steely, simmering anger.

I had to shift, again, in my understanding of the man I’d been married to. He was not a benign stranger wandering out of my life. He was an adversary, determined to win.

—

That year, we seemed to receive even more Christmas cards than usual, many of them arriving long after the New Year. Day after day they arrived, nearly a hundred images of happy, intact families. It was also the year many couples I knew, my contemporaries, celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversaries, the milestone I would never reach. They posted their wedding photos on Instagram, adding long paragraphs about the success of their marriages, their love for their spouses. Birthday posts seemed to multiply too, odes to terrific husbands, to beautiful wives.

Each card, each post, felt like a dagger. I knew they had nothing to do with me. The senders weren’t thinking about me at all. They had great families, good marriages; I understood why they were celebrating. Still, the pain of it was staggering, like the postman was delivering daily bombs, reminders of what I had lost. I was no longer one of them. I was something different now.

When I opened an envelope or looked at a post, I wanted to scream, I thought I had that too! I loved and was loved in the same way! There is nothing different about us!

I rarely posted on Instagram, but I had sent out Christmas cards for seventeen years, unaware of how it might feel to receive them. I had been unintentionally smug, flaunting my good fortune.

I didn’t send one in 2020. I would never send one again.

When each card arrived, I tore it in half, ripping through children and babies, husbands and wives, through smiling faces, and dropped it in the trash. I unfollowed people. I quit Instagram, rejoined, and quit again.

—

I dreaded Christmas. We’d done the same thing for fourteen years, since before Carrie was born: we flew up to Martha’s Vineyard early on Christmas morning; we wore matching Christmas pajamas and the dog wore a Santa suit; James cooked breakfast—scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages; we opened presents I’d mailed up; we went bowling; we took family walks, forcing the kids out of the house, down the paths in the woods; we watched movies; James organized a skating party at the local rink, dividing the ice between hockey players and ice skaters, inviting anyone we knew on the island, using the Rangers helmets and gloves he’d collected, serving chocolate chip cookies and thermoses of hot chocolate; James cooked elaborate dinners, including, always, Swedish meatballs; we opened our best wine. It was the same, year after year. We loved it.

Doing it without James, with his seat empty, felt impossible.

Thanksgiving that year, at Susan’s house in Sagaponack, was strange and chaotic—twenty people, including my brother’s family and my cousins, all of us cooking in masks. The kids did not feel James’s absence the way they would on Christmas.

James had texted, “You should take them to the Vineyard.” I couldn’t tell, in text, whether he felt sad about missing it, about handing the holiday over to me.

I debated doing something different, going somewhere new, but it wasn’t possible. COVID was still raging. The first variant had arrived in the United States in November.

I thought about Evie making linguini and clams and grape leaves in July, her wisdom in preserving what was important to our family. I made a decision: We will go to the Vineyard. I will do everything the same way. I will fill in the hole.

To make it easier, and more cheerful, I asked Susan to come. She agreed, understanding the mission. She cooked the sausages while I whisked the eggs. She built fires while I rolled Swedish meatballs. We watched movies. We went for family walks. The bowling alley and skating rink were closed, but everything else was the same.

There was a palpable sadness in every activity, but I also felt a determination, in each of us, to make it okay for one another. It reminded me of returning to my family’s house in Water Mill after my father’s death —Susan, my brother, and I wept in his closet, clutching his clothes and his pipes, stunned by his absence. But we tried to carry on, to help one another through it. This was not the same—James was alive and well in New York, perhaps spending the holiday with another woman. But the shock of his absence, the grief of moving forward without a member of the family, without our leading man, felt familiar.

On Christmas Day, after we’d eaten breakfast and opened presents, Susan and I sat facing each other in the upholstered chairs in the living room, our feet on the coffee table. The girls were on the floor next to us, playing with a new American Girl camper (even as teenagers, they loved American Girl). Finn was lying on the couch on the other side of the room, trying to solve the Rubik’s Cube I’d put in his stocking. The fire roared.

Classical music filled the room. It wasn’t perfect, but it was nice.

Susan mouthed to me, “What the fuck?”

I knew what she meant. What was so bad about this? Why would he give it up?

—

In January 2021, James and I exchanged our “production,” the documents required in discovery. His statements arrived all at once, in a zip file from my lawyer’s paralegal. As I read through it, clicking on document after document, statement after statement, my skin started to burn, like my nerve endings were on fire. I saw year after year of his earnings, investment returns and bonuses, accumulating into a fortune, which he held in his name alone.

I knew he’d been doing well, but I didn’t know the numbers, I hadn’t read the tax returns he’d placed in front of me to sign. I’d assumed we were both stretching ourselves to afford our life together. I didn’t know that he’d earned millions of dollars each year. I didn’t know how his earnings had added up. He had known everything about me, where every dollar of mine sat, but I had known nothing about him. He had not hidden it. I had chosen not to look. I had chosen not to know.

I found the printed agenda from our meeting with our lawyer in July 2019. I remembered what she had said about Susan ending tuition payments. I saw the last bullet about the prenup. The thing we hadn’t done.

The thing I had agreed to wait on.

Now James could claim his ownership stake in both properties. He could walk away with his assets. He could become a partner at a hedge fund, where his wealth would increase exponentially, unencumbered by me.

Was this the explanation? Was there a clock ticking, one I hadn’t heard?

A countdown to get out? A tipping point?

Or was the timing only a coincidence, career success meeting marital fatigue at one precise point, like lines on a graph—an explosive intersection neither of us could have predicted?

—

That winter, I stopped sleeping. Or, really, I slept in bursts of only an hour or so, waking up repeatedly, at 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 4 a.m., in a heart-racing panic. I switched sides of the bed each night, from my side to James’s, on the mattress he had bought and abandoned, trying to fill the empty space,

but it didn’t help. I slept with my laptop in my bed, turning it on each time I woke, restarting a familiar show, Schitt’s Creek or Friends, something to lull me, to force me to stop thinking. It worked for a bit, I would fall asleep again, but only briefly. At 5 a.m., I’d give up, even though it was still dark out. I’d turn on the lights, make my coffee, feed the dog. I was always relieved the night was over.

What I felt at night, when I woke up every hour, was ice-cold fear. My lawyer was preparing a counterclaim to James’s filing. It was a direct challenge to James, to how he wanted the divorce to play out.

I had little chance of success. But my lawyer and I agreed that I needed to try. The document took shape, slowly, painfully. When I lay in bed during the bleak hours, sentences floated through my mind. I knew every word. I knew every number. I knew my side of our story.

—

As January progressed, another narrative started forming in my consciousness, sentences and phrases, details of textbooks and cellos, gnocchi and whiskey sours, the cold tile of the bathroom floor. It was the story of James leaving, the emotional layers, the aspects of our parting that a legal document could not tell. I felt an all-consuming itch to put it down on paper, to record it. In the dark of one morning, I sat down at my desk and started writing. It was the first time I’d written anything (other than legal briefs) in thirty-five years. Since Greg told me I couldn’t write.

It felt primal, wanting to get it on the page. James had twisted the story of our ending into something that made him comfortable, one in which he hadn’t even left me. The dinner party hosts, the women on porches, the chorus of opining voices had also tried to turn it into something else. And so had I, at times, believing what James and the others said. Writing it felt like a flashlight in that haze. This is what happened.

But it was more than just journaling or venting. I was deliberate in the art of it. Other than crafts with the kids and some elaborate baking, I hadn’t done anything creative in my life as an adult, as a mother. I liked that part

of the writing, developing my skill, finding exactly the right word, establishing a rhythm. And I liked that it was just for me, with no other purpose.

I remember trying to write once while I was married, sitting down at my desk, attempting to capture something about my father, about his death.

Nothing came. I could barely get a sentence on the page. I couldn’t find a thread, a road in. I felt locked. But the ten months on my own, the winter of sleepless nights, the practice writing the counterclaim—it all seemed to have given me a key.

Looking back on those early days of writing, when I think of myself sitting at my desk, I see a woman stripped of the soft layers built up over twenty years of marriage—her trust in her husband, the comfort of their life together, the way their marriage placed her in the world. Without the layers, the padding, the woman at the desk can feel things, can see things. She has a way in.

Within a couple of weeks, I had a rough draft. At almost the exact moment I finished it, a friend emailed me the link to a memoir-writing class. She was signing up for it and thought I might like to join her. She remembered that I used to love to write. I thought, This is a sign. I need to do this. I could still hear the voice in my head, so familiar after three decades, telling me I was not a writer. I decided I had to do it anyway.

The class, on Zoom, was gentle and supportive. People read their work and we clapped. The teacher did not allow any critique. There was no danger of a Greg. But I didn’t read anything. I didn’t say anything. I evaded the teacher’s challenge to write for at least thirty minutes a day. But I did the in-class writing exercises. I listened to the writers who came to talk to us about writing their memoirs. And I kept looking at my piece about James leaving. I added more detail. I cut unnecessary words. I fiddled with sentences. It felt good to return to the pages each time, pulling them up on the screen, like old friends, places to rest my head.

—

In February, James moved from the Beekman apartment into his new apartment on Park Row. He turned his second bedroom into a home office, even though he had a large office three subway stops away. There was no bedroom for the kids. He kept in touch with them by text, always kindly, and took them out to an occasional dinner, but he continued to refuse a daily role in their lives.

My lawyer sent James a 50/50 custody agreement, the arrangement I would have wanted as a child. I thought we would reach resolution quickly, given that it was an equal split. I thought, by then, James would have realized his mistake, that he would want to claim his time with the kids.

What followed stunned me more than any custody dispute ever could: James returned the document stripped of all his time, including vacations, holidays, weeks during the summer. He included only dinner on Thursday nights.

He said he didn’t want to make the kids go back and forth between us.

He said he didn’t want to force them to rotate holidays. He said they were too old—now thirteen, sixteen, and eighteen—to have to do any of this, that they were “fully formed human beings.” He said they could decide when they wanted to see him. He said they could call him when they needed him.

I think he believed, genuinely, that he was making a selfless choice, that he was making things easier for them. I tried to convince him of what would be gained by living with them, the access you get when you make them breakfast, when they ask for help with homework, when they come home from a sleepover or a night out, when you take them on a trip. But he was resolute. He would not do it.

Several of James’s male friends echoed his rationale to me, nearly verbatim: Aren’t your kids too old to go back and forth? Won’t he be available to them if they need him? I was startled each time I heard this, his exact words and phrasing, their support for his decision.

What would they have said about me, had I given up all my time with my kids, had I decided not to have a room for a child as young as twelve?

A few women excused it, chalking it up to men being “hapless,”

“incapable.”

Is this a valid excuse? My father was not a natural at parenting, yet he claimed us, he made a home for us, he tried.

For almost a year, I tried to engage James in parenting, especially when I needed help. I told him how worried I was about Carrie, bearing the greatest toll of our separation as the youngest, her tears late at night. I sent him detailed updates from Evie’s school, their stringent COVID rules, calling him when I had to pick her up in Delaware at 1 a.m. after she had a positive test. I forwarded him alerts when Finn missed a class. I still wanted a partner in all of it. Sometimes he showed up. When Finn had surgery, he was very present, helping me manage Finn’s pain, speaking to the doctor, picking up his medications.

But more often, for everyday issues, he responded with irritation. Or he seemed mystified, like he had no idea what to do, like the kids were people he’d only recently met. Eventually, I stopped asking for help. It was too painful to be turned down, to encounter someone who felt like a distant relative when I expected to find my children’s father.

I could have demanded, more forcefully, that he host them for overnights, that he make a bedroom for them, or at least for Carrie. I could have gotten angry when the Thursday night dinners stopped. As the pandemic receded, I could have insisted that he take them away on vacations. I could have planned trips for him.

I didn’t do any of these things.

It felt dangerous, forcing it, when he didn’t choose it. It felt like opening the door to more hurt, more rejection, for the kids. I encouraged them to call him, to text him back, to go to dinner when he proposed it. I shared good news—their grades, Carrie’s high-school acceptances, Finn and Evie’s college acceptances. But otherwise, I let go of the rope. It was burning my hands, pulling so forcefully in the opposite direction.

Continuing to reach out also pulled against a boundary I was trying to draw, minimizing my contact with James, avoiding conflict, especially as he sued me in matrimonial court. I told the doormen in my building to call me when he wanted to come upstairs to drop off mail (he would sail past them, like the owner he was). I created a forwarding system that pushed his

emails to a special folder, so I could choose when to open them. Sometimes, when his texts were too harsh, I blocked his number. I was creating safe spaces for myself. I was padlocking my gates.

But still, I doubted myself: Was I being vindictive by not trying harder?

Should the parent who remains always take this on, no matter what they encounter in their former partner? Should I have kept all my doors open? Is this how to be a good mother? Is this how to be graceful?

—

Over President’s Day weekend, Carrie and I visited Susan at her house in Sagaponack. We celebrated Valentine’s Day on Saturday, decorating the breakfast table with chocolate hearts and roses. Susan gave us pink sweaters; we gave her red socks. It was freezing and windy, too cold to walk. Carrie and I watched a romantic comedy, Valentine’s Day, in bed. I pretended to pay attention, but I was really doing the Times crossword puzzle on my phone. Any movie with a love story, a wedding, a tale of destiny between two people, had become too hard to watch.

Saturday crosswords were ridiculously hard, sometimes taking me days to complete, but they were getting a little easier, the payoff of doing the puzzles every day, learning the clues they repeated, the style of answer they were looking for. My brother and I competed for speed, sending each other screenshots of our best times. He always beat me by a large margin, sometimes finishing the Saturday puzzle in under ten minutes.

Susan came into the room, holding the draft of the counterclaim I’d given her to read. She motioned for me to join her in the hallway. Once out of earshot of Carrie, she said, “Flo, I don’t know if you should do this.” She looked scared. Her face was pale, her left hand, holding the papers, was

shaking.

“Why not?”

She said, “He’s going to be angry.” I had never seen her look so worried. She had tried to protect me since I was three years old, guarding me with her thighs as I hid behind her. She was still trying to shield me

now, four decades later. If I filed the counterclaim, she might not be able to save me. I would be standing out there on my own.

I looked at the pages in her hand. “I know. He doesn’t expect me to fight back.”

She said, “I’m scared he will punish you for it.”

I took the pages from her and sighed. “It feels awful, all of it, filing it or not filing it, both options feel awful.”

Carrie and I returned home on Monday, three days before the filing deadline. I read the counterclaim closely again. I went back and forth, trying to decide. I nearly vibrated with fear.

It would be easier, safer, to let the divorce proceed as James wanted it to. To trust that he would be fair to me in the end. That’s what everyone, including James, expected me to do. That was the choice that would keep me safe.

But why should I trust James to be fair to me? Why would it serve me, or my children, to be silent?

There was something growing in me, an almost nihilistic desire to set flame to the remaining structures of my former life, to the very safety I clung to, to the fiction that I could depend on anyone other than myself for protection, to the idea that being quiet was the only way to be good. And a deepening of an instinct, within me since the first days after James left, that the truth was the only possible foundation for what would come next.

On Thursday, February 18, I wrote to my lawyer, “I’m ready. Let’s file it.”

—

In early 2021, the pandemic continued to keep New Yorkers home. We were still masked, still avoiding gatherings, still scared. Even so, as a newly single woman, everywhere I turned, I seemed to encounter pressure to date, an expectation that I enter the market. When I ran into a friend or acquaintance who knew my story, they often asked the same questions, in succession:

“Is he still with that woman?”

It was always a jolt to be asked about her. I had disciplined my brain not to think about the affair, about her face, her name, but here she was

again, delivered to my consciousness.

I answered, “I don’t know.” I didn’t.

And then, “Are you dating?”

When they asked this, I felt a deep discomfort, a sense of being

misunderstood. And a trace of anger.

“No.”

My closest people did it too. They encouraged me to join dating apps, to spread the word that I wanted to be fixed up. It was as though time were running out. There were so few available men, and I was nearly fifty-two.

I’d better find one fast.

It all came from a good place. My friends wanted me to be happy again, to be healed, to have fun. They had faith that I could, and would, find someone. I had several divorced friends who had met wonderful partners after a period of conscientious dating. I still believed in love and relationships. And I was lonely. I continued to feel the ache, in my apartment alone, night after night. I continued to feel like an alien at group gatherings, with almost all my friends married or partnered.

Still, I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t market myself. It wasn’t like men were beating down my door, but I couldn’t bring myself to indicate, even gently, that I was open to it. I know I was scared. I could not imagine how I could trust someone again. It wasn’t just trusting that they would be faithful, it was trusting that I could believe in what they presented to me, that they weren’t harboring an alternate self, one I couldn’t see.

Harder to admit was that I was still, in some way, in love with James, with the version of him that had disappeared. Since we hadn’t unwound from each other while we were together, my heart and my body were still tied to him, my husband, the man who continued to appear in my dreams almost every night. People assumed that once James left, the moment he walked out the door, my love for him would vanish too. But how does one

turn that off after twenty-two years? How long does it take your unconscious mind to catch up?

I was also anxious about my kids, almost as if they were babies again and I couldn’t risk taking my eyes off them. I wanted to be as steady for them as possible, as their father floated away. I remembered my mother’s boyfriends, the way they pulled her from us, how disorienting that felt, to have a stranger in the house, appearing at breakfast. I would do it differently. I had heard the term “potted plant years”—teenagers may not want to talk to you, but they like you to be around, to be there when they go out, to be there when they return. I wanted to be a potted plant for my children.

But the trace of anger I felt when I was asked about dating, or encouraged to work at it, was because of the subtext: You won’t be okay until you have another man to protect you. We won’t be comfortable with you, with the state of things, until you are back in the norm. If you don’t recouple, we will place you in the dreaded category of divorced women— those who haven’t “moved on.”

Why? Why did I have to secure a man to be okay?

Even in my loneliness, even with the script I read myself about being unlovable, I rejected this storyline.

That is not my happy ending. That is not my definition of moving on.

That is not my definition of success.

So, except for a few dinners with an old friend, I did not date at all.

—

In March, I received my client’s green card in the mail. My law partner and I drove out to Queens to deliver it to her and her mother. We stood outside on the sidewalk, the four of us masked, all of us in parkas. We took photos.

We hugged. We felt palpable joy. Our client was now a permanent resident.

She could access federal grants and loans for college. In five years, she would become a US citizen.

Fueled by the success, we took on a new case. Our new client, an eight- year-old girl, came to the United States with her parents for two urgent reasons: her father had been beaten and jailed for pro-democracy political activities, and her mother had a serious illness. Her mother could not access treatment in her home country.

Our client’s father promptly filed an asylum application with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), listing his wife and daughter as co-applicants. He was a teacher but the only work he could find was driving a taxi in Brooklyn. In March 2020, the same month my family and I arrived at our second home, he drove sick people back and forth to the hospital in his taxi. He soon contracted COVID and, after being refused an ambulance twice, he died. He had waited five years for an asylum interview; the interview notice arrived six months after his death. When our client and her mother appeared for the interview, they were told that his death extinguished the asylum claim and they would have to start again, filing for themselves.

My partner and I sought Special Immigrant Juvenile status for our client in family court and prepared an asylum application for our client’s mother.

We drafted affidavits, memoranda of law, supporting documents. I was better at it at this point. I didn’t cry. I made fewer mistakes. We appeared in family court virtually and our client’s application was approved. She would have to wait years for a green card (availability is determined by the applicant’s country of origin), but this was a critical first step.

Our client’s mother faced a greater challenge. Her own asylum application would almost certainly be denied; the nexus between her and the political persecution suffered by her husband was weak. If her application was denied, under USCIS’s current “first in, first out” system, she could be deported within a couple of months, returning to a dangerous country where she would have no access to the treatment that kept her alive.

She was faced with a terrible choice: stay underground and risk losing her health insurance and access to treatment, or file for asylum and risk deportation, separation from her daughter, and a certain death sentence. She chose the former.

Once again, the rigor of the work, the detail of it, was absorbing and grounding. It forced me to think about something other than my divorce. It also forced me to acknowledge how myopic, how grandiose, I’d been about my own story. It wasn’t just recognizing my comparative good fortune (which was enormous); it was seeing the scope of life, of challenge, of suffering, of what human beings endure; it was a zooming out.

—

Exactly a year after James left me, at the end of March, I texted him late at night. During these hours, I still felt a raw pain lodged in my chest, making it hard to breathe, impossible to sleep.

I wrote, “You never told me what I did wrong in our marriage, why you stopped loving me. It is such an awful thing, after twenty-one years, not to know.”

I had hoped something had changed, that he would give me the answer, the lost frames of the movie, something to help me understand what had happened.

He wrote back, “I wish I could answer your question, something broke in me, it was me and not you, you did nothing wrong.”

It should have been a relief, hearing again that it was not my fault. But it felt like a fresh blow—the answer without an answer, the refusal to fill in the blanks, the assumption that one sentence would be enough.

—

I visited Evie at her boarding school in Delaware as often as I could, as often as the school would allow me. They had very strict rules during the pandemic. Parents could not enter buildings. The students could not leave the gates. It was like they were in prison. I brought Evie and her friends Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A, Chipotle. We sat outside on the lawn, in the cold, pulling down our paper masks to eat.

I often stopped to see Anna, my friend from boarding school, at her house in Wilmington. On one visit, as we walked over the hills of a nearby

golf course with her five dogs—four dachshunds and a black lab—she said,

“You are so different now.”

“What do you mean?”

She answered, “You are different than when you were married.”

She walked ahead, pulled by one of the dachshunds, the curls of her dark hair bouncing. I felt a defensiveness rise in me. Do not go there.

She continued, “I don’t know how to describe it. You were much harder to know then.”

I replied, with an edge, “You weren’t easy either.”

She answered, “I know. My mother getting sick broke me open.” It was true. She had become more vulnerable, softer, when her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer.

I relaxed a little with her admission. “Okay, what do you mean about me?”

She continued, “You seemed tense, stressed. You had walls up.”

We walked for a few minutes in silence.

She said, “I’m sorry. I’m upsetting you.”

She was upsetting me. Whenever I encountered the implication that I hadn’t been a great person when I was married, a great wife, I went on alert, ready to shoot. My narrative was dependent on me being blameless, on James having no valid reason to leave. If I let in the competing idea, my entire story, the one in which I was an angelic victim, would crumble. Even with James’s assurance that it hadn’t been my fault, my greatest fear was still the simplest explanation: he left because of me. I hadn’t made James happy. Worse, I had made him unhappy. It may not have been any more complicated than that.

I can make a list of things James may have grown to dislike about me. I could be tightly wound, stressed and anxious about plans, upset if something small or big went wrong with the kids, when travel went awry. I did not share his interests in tennis, hockey, or ancient archaeology, and I didn’t try to learn about them. I nagged him to do things like walk the dog and pick up dinner in Chinatown. I was irritated when he left silverware in a pile in the corner of the sink instead of loading it in the dishwasher. I was

not as skinny or desirable as I’d been when we met. I may not have made him feel appreciated enough for how hard he worked, for the ways he provided for our family. I hated his favorite band, Dinosaur Jr., and told him to turn it down, or turn it off, when he played their albums loudly from his laptop.

Two years before he left, when we were on a trip with a group of couples, I struggled with the social dynamic among the women; it felt like a high-school clique I could not break into. I had a meltdown in our hotel room, exacerbated by having sprained my ankle, an injury everyone seemed to find annoying. James was unsympathetic to my plight. He was mad. And cold. As I thought about my failings, that night returned to me—my discomfort, his irritation.

Maybe this was enough to answer the ultimate question, the one he had refused to answer for me? Maybe he was sparing my feelings by not telling me that it was all because of me? Maybe I had to own it?

And maybe I failed to see the signs of his unhappiness—going to bed so early, how rote his routine was (work, tennis, television), the cocktail as soon as he walked through the door. I should have seen it and done something about it. It was my fault for not figuring it out.

Some people say the end of a marriage is always fifty-fifty, that each partner bears equal responsibility. “It takes two to tango.” I’d heard this about other divorces, often about the wife who was left, even when the husband had engaged in years of betrayals and lies: She wasn’t fun enough.

She was too focused on the kids. She didn’t pay enough attention to him.

I’m sure similar things were said about me.

But is it fifty-fifty when the unhappy person doesn’t say they are unhappy? When they act like everything is exactly as they want it to be, leaving their partner to guess? When they don’t give their partner a warning, a beat to change course, to grow, before betraying them, before cutting the cord?

And couldn’t you make your own list? Isn’t there always a list?

Anna and I scaled a hill, the dogs running ahead of us. I asked, “How do you think I’m different now?”

She paused. “You are lighter, easier, more relaxed. You laugh more, smile more. There aren’t any hidden rules. I don’t have to translate your mood. You tell me right away when I make you mad, which honestly delights me. You are speaking your mind.”

I smiled. “Okay, go on.”

She continued, “When something goes off course, you let it go. If not right away, then after some time thinking about it, digesting it. You seem to be letting go of a bigger set of cultural standards, of some sort of externally imposed idea of who you should be.”

I recognized what she was saying. I was more relaxed. I did laugh more. I could linger in conversations. I could let things go. I could welcome dozens of rowdy teenagers in my home without flinching. Something in me had opened. Something in me had mellowed.

What was it about losing my marriage that made me looser? Why was I more at ease with myself?

It was everything—the quiet of the pandemic, remaining single, all that time on my own, being with myself. It was having everything I had counted on collapse so suddenly, forcing me to let go of the idea that I could control outcomes. It was the loss of my identity as a wife, my identity as part of a married couple. I had to get comfortable existing outside the norm, outside of what had once been my ideal.

As Anna and I turned back toward her house, I thought, Maybe it is more than that? Maybe James’s distance, his not quite being there, made me closed? Maybe steering the ship of our family on my own, carrying the emotional load alone, was what made me tense?

Anna continued, “I know you had everything you wanted. I know you loved him, and you loved your marriage, your family. But you are yourself again, more like the Belle I knew in 1985.”

I answered, “I think that’s true.” I paused and thought for the first time, I like myself more now.

—

While our divorce was pending, James and I had to continue sharing bills, expenses, taxes. He was still in charge. I had to annotate credit card bills even more precisely, justifying every expense. He had to approve any significant expenditures in advance. He was even more stringent, more insistent that we control spending, that we cut back. His care, his authority, continued, in some way, to make me feel safe. And I was spared, for a time, handling it all myself, having to understand it, having to face the reality of my financial life. I still believed I couldn’t do it. I still believed I needed him to protect me.

I also hated it, having to explain myself, having to answer to him, allowing him to make decisions, both big and small. I could no longer convince myself that he was taking care of me. And I could see that the cost for feeling safe was being controlled. They were two sides of the same coin —protection and control.

Some divorced women I knew were still financially entwined with their ex-husbands. The men paid expenses directly. They provided credit cards.

They still owned the apartments where their ex-wives lived. It is often a wise and necessary financial choice, to keep these arrangements going. But I knew that once we were divorced, continuing to defer to James, continuing to abandon my own authority, would feel intolerable.

I wrote to my lawyer, “Wherever we end up, I want no overlap in our finances. I want a clean break. I don’t want to answer to him ever again.”

—

As the weather warmed again, April turning to May, I went out to more dinners with friends, almost always groups of women. I no longer seemed to be a candidate for couples’ dinners, a fact I had grown to accept. We were still seated outside at restaurants, on sidewalks, under covered structures, sometimes in claustrophobic cabanas—the bulky architecture of the pandemic.

During these dinners with women I liked, I noticed that they often spoke about their husbands. Sometimes they complained—small things that

annoyed them or bigger things, revealing fractures I hadn’t known about, unhappiness they had never shared before. It felt generous, an effort to tell me that, while married, their lives were not perfect.

More often, women praised their husbands, sharing a story in passing about how thoughtful they were, how accomplished, how terrific they were as fathers. Or they complimented one another’s husbands, trading accolades.

I don’t think it was intentional or unkind; it seemed almost unconscious, as if my presence, my story, spurred a reflexive defense in them, of their spouses, their marriages, their families, to reassure not just themselves, but one another, that all was well. I usually agreed with them— their husbands were good men—but still, I felt wounded. They were celebrating the very thing I had lost.

I asked myself, Maybe it had always happened—these passing comments—and I was only now sensitive to it? Maybe I had done it too, when I’d had a husband?

And did I really want them to stop? Did I want them to censor themselves because I was at the table? Did I want to be seen as fragile, angry, envious, leading to fewer invitations, fewer intimacies?

After one dinner, I texted a friend in London. She had been divorced for a few years. She had left her husband, but we faced similar challenges. We both parented our children almost alone. We both found ourselves in very married settings while no longer married.

I asked her, “Have you noticed this, the praising of husbands?”

She said, “All the time. It’s crazy. I don’t think they realize it. When it happens, I completely disassociate; I think about something else, anything else, until the conversation ends.”

I started doing the same thing, taking my brain to a different place while I smiled, pretending to listen.

—

Finn graduated from high school in May. Only parents and siblings were allowed to attend the ceremony. Evie was still in boarding school, so it was just me, James, and Carrie. I braced myself for it. We were still awaiting the judge’s decision. James had not said anything to me about my counterclaim.

I hadn’t seen him in months.

I wore a black sleeveless dress and heeled sandals, trying to shield myself in clothes that felt both strong and impersonal. We were all masked, sitting quietly in the church’s pews. I looked around for friends, other mothers of graduates. They nodded at me. They knew what I was facing.

James arrived, walking up the aisle in his navy suit, his crisp shirt and tie, his blue mask. I felt the familiar rush of love, the flutter I’d always felt when he appeared. And then the rush of sadness, the chill.

I stood up to let him into the pew, to sit between me and Carrie. As we waited for the ceremony to begin, as he chatted with Carrie, I looked straight ahead, trying to focus my thoughts on Finn. He had finished high school during COVID, during the sudden breakup of our family. And he was going to college. It felt like an epic accomplishment.

During the school year, Finn had continued to resist intimate conversations, about the divorce or anything else, but we’d pushed through each day, each application, each challenge—me as a potted plant, he as a maturing teenager, inching toward the finish line. It was not easy, and we’d done it without James.

I wanted to say to James, Look what he did! Look what I did! I wanted my steadiness, my daily effort, my care for our children to be acknowledged. But I had learned that he would not give me that.

When I looked down, I could see James’s hand resting on his thigh. My whole body yearned to move closer to him, to press my thigh against his, to thread my fingers through his, as I had so many times before. It was like my body still had not received the message, that this man was no longer mine, that he was someone else.

After the ceremony, families gathered in the schoolyard for a reception.

Finn and his friends beamed, their eyes shining, their masks pulled down to smoke cigars, looking like both the boys they had been and the men they

were becoming. I took photographs of Finn with James, Finn with Carrie.

James took photographs of me with Finn. And then one as a family, Finn and Carrie in the middle, James and I bookending them.

As we milled around the yard, James seemed breezy, light, unencumbered. There was no sense of tension or danger about what was happening between us, about what was going to happen next.

—

In July, in a short decision delivered by email, the judge dismissed my counterclaim, enforced the prenup, and set a trial date in October. The trial would resolve child support and ownership of our joint property, including the house and the apartment. My lawyer feared that given the enforcement of the prenup, the judge would almost certainly grant James his ownership stake in both homes. She said I would have to hope that James would be kind.

James had not mentioned the counterclaim before the decision, but now he was inflamed by it. He said he would give me only the minimum child support required by law. He said I would have to face the consequences of the prenup, of my failed counterclaim.

In early August, James’s lawyer sent a searing letter. He restated the terms of the prenup. He said he assumed I wanted to buy James out of his interests in the house and the apartment, and if so, that we should schedule appraisers to establish the value of both properties. He also said I had the alternate option: to sell one or both of my homes. At the bottom of the letter, he copied James.

I could not afford to buy James out of either home. I would have to sell both.

When I read the letter, when I read James’s texts, the world shifted. It became very dark.

My children were going to lose the house they loved, the center of our life as a family, and the apartment where they lived, in addition to managing the emotional toll of their father leaving. I was going to lose what my

grandparents and my father had given me, betraying them too. I was going to lose my financial security.

There was no reason for it, given James’s resources, given his desire to shed, given his refusal to make a home for the kids. It felt like he was playing a game, or running a deal, one he was going to win at all costs, by a wide margin, regardless of the impact on me and our children.

I fell into a deep well of despair and shame. I could no longer see the road ahead of me. I couldn’t leave the house. I couldn’t get out of bed. It was the same paralysis I’d felt in the first weeks after James left, but it felt much darker. When I closed my eyes, I saw myself hanging from the rafter in my bedroom. I could feel the cold metal of a gun against my temple. I imagined stepping off the tiles of my roof. I did not feel suicidal, I made no plans to hurt myself, but the images kept coming, rotating, like in a View- Master toy I’d had as a kid.

I texted my mother about what was happening, what I was seeing. I thought she would understand, having been through a depression in middle age, but I think I was really asking her to rescue me. I was scared. I didn’t want to bother my psychiatrist while she was on vacation, away for the month of August.

Within an hour, my psychiatrist called me. My mother had tracked her down, terrified by what I had told her. My doctor put a name to what was happening—suicidal ideation. It could be sparked by intense stress and anxiety.

She said, “There is great emotional importance in a home. It is your history, your security, your identity, the way you shield and nurture your children. Losing your home will be deeply dislocating for you and the kids, as it is for many women going through divorce.”

I said, “Other women face much more dire consequences. I should not complain.” I had tried to have perspective, to see how privileged I still was, no matter what happened in the divorce. But my fear had made me myopic again, only able to see what I would lose.

She replied, “Belle, it is still a profound loss. Especially since the person you trusted most is on the other side.” She continued, “The images

you are seeing are an expression of agency, your brain giving you an escape hatch in the face of helplessness.”

She put me on an antidepressant. Within a week, to my great relief, the images stopped. But the fear and shame remained.

—

During this dark, terrifying period, I still dreamt about James. In each dream, he appeared as the old version of him, as my kind and loving husband. I was so happy to see him, as he was to see me. We embraced, our hands joined, we kissed. There were even sex scenes, skin on skin, his body

returning to mine.

Sometimes I asked, “Where did you go?”

He answered, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.”

I felt the sensation of letting go, the dissipation of the betrayal, the fear, the hurt, the relief.

When I woke up, my reality returned with a great thud.

I tried to will my brain to spare me from these dreams, to let go of my love, my longing, for this man who no longer existed.

—

As my lawyer and I prepared for trial, I told people what was at stake, what James was threatening. I did this in a desperate state, hoping someone, anyone, would intervene. My specific longing was for one of his male friends to take a stand, to say, Do not do this to her. Do not do this to your kids. I knew, in his world, the voice had to be male for it to land.

Instead, what I found, from some men, was a lack of concern, an acceptance of the state of things, a strong desire not to get involved. The message I received was that I should accept my fate; I should accept whatever James chose to give me. It felt like they were saying, You’ve had a good run with your hedge fund husband. You should be grateful. It is time to pack your bags and go.

At a dinner party in August, a man asked me how the divorce was going. I said, quietly, “Not well. It’s brutal. He’s trying to force me to sell my homes, which I bought.” I was too raw then to censor myself, and I thought this man would be horrified by what I was telling him.

The man smiled widely and nodded. He said, “Ah, he’s playing hardball!”

I thought, Is this the game? Discard your wife and then give her as little as possible? Is this how these men impress one another?

In late September, I learned that James was invited on a hunting weekend with a group of men I knew well, men whom I liked. I hadn’t expected these men to cut James off; I knew it was better for all of us if James had friends. But including him at that moment, three weeks before our trial, knowing what he planned to do, shocked me. These men would drink with him, eat with him, chat with him, walk through the fields at dawn with guns in their hands.

I knew then: He can do whatever he wants to me. He won’t face any consequences.

I was told that two of the men spoke to James over the weekend, encouraging him to be kind to me, but he returned from the trip even angrier, even more aggressive, as if the experience had refilled his tank, as if his basest intentions had been blessed.

I had several men in my life who stood up for me. A childhood friend, Evie’s godfather, called me often, offering advice and support. Two other men on the Vineyard, a banker and a lawyer, tried to help me strategize, sharing insights about men in finance, about what matters to them and what doesn’t.

My brother had been involved with the divorce from the beginning, lending his financial expertise, reading the counterclaim, interpreting James’s spreadsheets. He was always calm, always reassuring me that things would work out fairly, encouraging me to move slowly, carefully.

But when James’s plans were clear, my brother became distraught. His back went out and he couldn’t move from his couch for two weeks. When his friends asked him what had happened, he answered, “My sister’s divorce.”

He called and emailed me and my lawyer nearly every day, trying to come up with ideas to encourage, or force, James to settle.

Gradually, as the trial date approached, I started to accept what was going to happen. I started to imagine my life differently, the kids’ lives differently. We would sell the house. We would move to a smaller apartment. I told myself every day, like a mantra, I can do this. I can make a life for us.

It helped to take responsibility for it. To see the moments, over twenty years, when I hadn’t protected myself, when I had chosen comfort over conflict, not knowing over knowing. I had put myself here, one decision at a time.

I agreed to change the prenup, dismissing legal advice.

I put both our names on the deeds.

I chose not to be involved in our financial life.

I failed to make sure our prenup was extinguished.

I failed to think about what would happen if our marriage ended.

But I also tried to have compassion for the woman I was, agreeing to all of it, trusting my husband.

I did it for love. There is nothing shameful about that.

—

James and I reached a settlement an hour before our trial was set to begin, with terms determined by James. In our limited negotiations, by email, without our lawyers, I had to be calm, deferential, grateful. I had no wiggle room; he said if I pushed him, if I enlisted the help of my lawyer, if I refused specific language, he would withdraw his offer and go to trial.

In the end, he gave up his interests in the house, the apartment, the beach, and the club. He pays me child support. He covers medical expenses and high-school tuition for the kids. He kept the money he accumulated during our marriage.

I don’t know what finally made him decide to settle. I have several guesses, but I will never know for sure. Maybe he always planned to

resolve it before trial, to give me the house and the apartment. But only after he brought me to my knees.

I give myself a lot of credit for the result, for weaving through the negotiations, for keeping my eyes on what I needed to keep my kids’ lives stable, to keep what I cared about. I see the ending as a success. I have everything I need. I have everything that matters. I have plenty.

When I signed the agreement, I thought, I will let this go now. I will not live in this conflict anymore.

I was successful, for the most part, in letting it go. I don’t think about the details of our divorce. I don’t focus on what was lost.

What remains, what still brings a lump to my throat, a chill to my bones, is not about money.

It is the possibility that there was a timetable, a clock I didn’t hear ticking.

It is his willingness to make me afraid when I was already devastated, already on the floor.

It is what he made clear within weeks of leaving, that he believed my contributions to his career, to our family, over twenty years, amounted to nothing.

—

After we settled, my lawyer helped me create a checklist of everything I had to do to separate myself from James financially. New checking accounts, a mortgage refinancing, registry applications for revised deeds, COBRA. It was a very long, very overwhelming list. James and I had created a complicated web over twenty years, with all strings leading back to him. I had to cut each string and begin again. I was overcome with anxiety. This is what I had feared. Understanding it. Doing it myself. Being responsible.

I chipped away at it. I created spreadsheets and budgets. I asked questions. I made myself understand it. I was pushy in making sure my mortgage refinancing closed at the locked-in rate. When I had to correspond

with James about finances (or anything at all), I approached him as he had approached our divorce—emotionless, transactional.

Slowly, over many months, as my head came out of the sand, a form of joy set in—joy born of replacing the not knowing with knowing, the nub of worry with clarity, the lack of control with control. All made easier, of course, by the fact that I had enough to feel secure, to make my children secure.

I thought, This is better than everything I lost. This is better than the life I thought I wanted.

—

I took the memoir-writing class again in the spring of 2022. It was still on Zoom, once a week, from late February until late April. This time, I wrote for thirty minutes, at the same time every day, as the teacher instructed. At 6 a.m., after I woke Carrie and made her breakfast, I got my coffee, sat at my desk, and wrote. Thirty minutes grew to an hour, then two hours, then three.

I wrote about my father’s death, my stepfather, Rose. I liked the way it felt, sitting there, just me and the computer, working through things, crafting sentences, returning to each piece like they were friends or children who needed tending.

At the beginning of every class, the teacher asked if anyone wanted to read their work. A few people always volunteered. They read for three minutes and we clapped. During the second-to-last class, I raised my hand to read. I told myself I had to do it, I had to take this risk, to read my words.

I pulled up the essay I had written about James leaving. I knew I could get through half of it in three minutes. As I read, I tried to keep my voice even, but it wavered. My face grew hot, as it had when I was in school.

When I was done, I closed the document and looked at my classmates.

Everyone clapped. The teacher smiled from her square on the screen. I turned off my camera and microphone, went to my bathroom, and threw up.

I read the second half of the piece the following week, during our last class.

I had written the essay in the format of “Modern Love,” the New York Times column about relationships. I had loved the column since it first appeared in 2004. I knew the rhythm of the pieces, the flow, the punch at the end. I knew the word count.

The day the memoir class ended, two days before my fifty-second birthday, I submitted the piece to [email protected], their virtual slush pile. I titled it “And Then He Was Gone.” I hadn’t asked anyone to edit it. I wanted it to be all mine, to be exactly as I’d written it. I knew they received more than ten thousand submissions a year, even more during the pandemic. The chances of publication were less than one percent. Still, I pressed “Send.”

—

I received our divorce decree in July 2022. I was on the Vineyard when it arrived in my email inbox. It was shocking to see our names again, the v. for him against me, the words ending our marriage. It was still painful to see James’s choice on paper.

In the order, the judge granted me the right to return to my maiden name. I had to ask his permission. I understood why some of my friends kept their married names, the name their children had, after a divorce. But for me, changing my name felt like a public declaration, a before and after.

As pieces of identification arrived in the mail—a new social security card, a new passport, new credit cards—I felt a rush of excitement and purpose. I was shedding my identity as James’s wife. I was returning to who I had been before I was married. And I was adopting a new identity as a divorced woman, the label I never would have chosen on my own.

I still had two versions of that woman in my head: the undesirable, abandoned woman who sat in loneliness, who waited patiently for invitations from married couples, and the strong, independent one who decided how she would live her life, with whom she would spend her time, where she would go. A woman who would claim her role as her family’s matriarch with pride, not shame. A woman who was no longer controlled or

overshadowed by a man. I used Susan’s spotlight trick again, forcing myself to shift the light from the first version to the second.

—

I ordered two new signs for our driveway: one with my last name and one with the kids’ last name. It felt important to me—my renaming, the public statement of ownership. When the signs arrived, I could see that they were too big, almost obnoxious, but I felt a thrill once they were installed. I stood there for a long time, on the dirt road, looking at my name.

The Meadowpath sign James had nailed on the gate in 2006 was still there, the name we had adopted with such joy, the name that had symbolized all we had built together, the name appropriated from the original occupants of the land. I had left it there, thinking, This is still our home. This is still what James and I created together.

But then I thought. No, it’s not. It is not that anymore.

I went back to the house, opened the junk drawer next to the fridge, and found a screwdriver. I walked back up the driveway and wedged it behind the sign, trying to pry it away. It wouldn’t budge. I went back to the house and found a hammer. I returned to the gate and pounded the sign off. It dropped to the hard dirt of the driveway.

I carried the sign into the living room and stacked it on top of the wood in the fireplace. I was still using logs that James had chopped two years before, when I clung to him during the frightening first days of the pandemic, a mix of blueberry, oak, and pine. I lit a match and set fire to all of it.

That year, I let the paths of our woods become padded with leaves, with poison ivy, with pine needles and brush. I let the trees on the edge of the lawn grow in. The overgrowth was a daily reminder of James’s absence, of the loss of his care and tending. But it was beautiful, in its own way, the growing in, the wildness.

—

I threw a big party at the end of July. It was not a divorce celebration; I did not think my divorce was anything to celebrate. But I wanted to welcome all the people who had been kind to me, and the few who hadn’t. I wanted to make it clear that I had survived my calamity. When my guests drove in, they saw my maiden name on the gate. There could be no uncertainty about who would stay, about who would disappear.

—

The Chilmark Road Race takes place every August on the island. It is a five-kilometer race on a famously beautiful road with open horse pastures, classic Chilmark rock walls, shading oak trees. It is a community event, with participants ranging from newborns being pushed in their strollers to senior citizens. Residents line the course to cheer, holding homemade signs, manning water tables, spraying hoses to cool down runners. Participants wear race T-shirts dating back to 1978, the year the race was launched to benefit the Chilmark Community Center. Participation is a labor of love—to get to the starting line, runners must take a bus, walk a stretch, and wait, often for almost an hour, for the race to begin. While the course is bucolic and fairly short, it is not easy—there are several gradual, torturous hills.

I started running in the race in 2014 and returned every year. I loved it —the community spirit, bumping into people I hadn’t seen all summer, collecting my bibs like prizes. I brought each of the kids once, Finn when he was twelve, the girls at fourteen and eleven, all enthusiastic until they encountered the hills.

Before 2020, I ran regularly over the summer. I always felt ready for the race once the second Saturday in August rolled around. But after James left, I stopped running. It felt too harsh, requiring too much energy, too much of me. I’d walked the eight-mile loop around Vineyard Haven, but I never ran again, not even a jog.

The race had been canceled in 2020 for the pandemic and I skipped it in 2021, when I was in the middle of the divorce, when I felt so fragile. In August 2022, after my divorce was final, after I’d changed my name, after

the fear had dissipated, I did the race again. I went by myself, sitting on the bus alone, standing in the crowd at the starting line, feeling anxious, wondering if I would be able to do it, if I would make it up the hills, if I could finish.

But as I ran, as I encountered each hill, as I plodded slowly up the gradual slopes, I felt steady, solid. My breath was even. I didn’t worry about all the people passing me. I told myself any finish time was fine, as long as I didn’t stop.

To my amazement, I beat all my previous times. All the walking, miles and miles over two years, must have increased my endurance. Without intending to, I had made myself stronger.

—

My law partner and I took on another immigration case. We were representing our first male client, a fourteen-year-old boy. His mother had died when he was two. He had been physically and emotionally abused by his father. He had been forced to miss school to work in their fields. He had been harassed, chased, and beaten by local gangs. At thirteen, he traveled by bus and train toward the United States, eventually crossing the border by foot. He was detained by border agents and released with a USCIS hearing date. He took a bus to New York, where he was welcomed by his maternal aunt.

Neither my partner nor I speak Spanish, so we engaged a friend of hers, another former corporate lawyer, to translate. We conducted interviews, all slower with translation, and prepared his documents. We appeared at our client’s USCIS hearing and filed his paperwork in family court.

There was something different about working with a boy. I thought about Finn often, about James, about the difficult road from boyhood to manhood. I thought, again, about the power of putting words to experiences, especially traumatic ones, and the power of personal narrative.

I had done it for myself, in my counterclaim and my essay, and for my

clients in the paperwork we filed in court, but not for James. I had stopped trying to see his whole story, the pieces that made the man he had become.

—

After James picked up the boxes I’d opened and retaped in the spring of 2020, I went through the basement, trying to organize the mess. I skirted mice droppings and cobwebs as I crawled on the cold concrete floor and pulled bins from the wooden shelves. I went through the banker boxes Susan had given me from the house in Water Mill—my father’s documents from his time on the city council, his campaign memorabilia, his college thesis on Henry Miller. I found remnants of my childhood—a diary from third grade that was excessively cheerful, even about Rose, as if I thought someone would read it. There were several journals from trips to Europe with my father and Susan, my loopy childhood print reviewing the food, décor, service, and bathrooms of every restaurant we went to. I pulled out the uniform skirt I’d worn on my last day of ninth grade, signed by my classmates in blue ballpoint pen. I found stacks of handwritten letters from Lynn and Anna, sent to me every summer, long before email existed. There were several boxes of Archie comic books, their covers faded.

I found the red diary James and I used to document our love affair in 1998, our tiny print in pencil, alternating each day, from him to me. I found our wedding album on a shelf, wrapped in a dish towel. I’d placed it there in March 2020, one of the items that was too painful to look at after James left. There were objects that tracked the growth of our family—Finn’s first shoes (red leather with Velcro straps), the puffy pink snowsuit both girls wore home from the hospital, dozens of paintings from the years of art classes on our lawn, papier-mâché birds and family portraits from their days in elementary school. I found hockey helmets and ice skates, Christmas decorations, wooden sleds, the framed map of James and Evie’s epic walk in Rome.

From a high shelf, I pulled down plastic bins of photographs, the extra prints I hadn’t taped into our albums, loose ones from my childhood and

James’s. I looked through the images of both of us, small color prints and larger black-and-white portraits. I saw myself as a shy little girl with big eyes, always watching, always a little bit scared. I saw James as a surprisingly large baby (his mother had told me he refused baby food, grabbing hamburgers from her hand at six months old), as a child of ten, a towhead with a mischievous grin, on the dig in Crete as a high-school student, writing in a journal, his skin golden brown, his hair nearly white.

When I looked at the photographs of James at eight, ten, twelve, I saw Finn, the resemblance strong at every age. I also saw a child, a boy, his parents’ beloved, wild middle son. That child had been changed by what had happened to his father, by the story no one spoke about. That child had lived with a pervasive fear of financial ruin, of never having enough, from an age before puberty. That child felt a crushing comparison to his friends with easy wealth, who never had to worry. That child had lost the house he loved. That child had worried for decades about both his parents, about his own survival. That child grew into a man who was still scared. That child grew into a man who could leave his family without explaining why, maybe without knowing why. That child grew into a man who would fight fiercely to keep what he believed was his.

I felt a rush of something—not quite tenderness, but an understanding.

James’s need to protect himself existed long before he had met me, long before I walked into his office with my Oscar ballot. If what happened in our divorce was vengeance, it was an existential vengeance, not a personal one. It had very little to do with me. And it existed on another plane from our love story.

—

In February 2023, nine months after I submitted my essay to “Modern Love,” I emailed the slush pile address again, asking if they could let me know if it was a rejection. I got an email from the senior editor of the column the next day. He wrote that they were considering it for publication.

I was elated.

I called my mother and Susan. They reacted almost identically—with great excitement for me, about my return to writing, about the opening of something new after my heartbreak, about the validation. They loved the piece. But their excitement was quickly followed by fear. They were scared that James would be angry and retaliate if I published it. They worried about me putting something so personal out into the world.

My mother asked, “Can he unwind your settlement?”

Susan said, “You’ve come so far since then. You are not just this story anymore.”

My mother and Susan are both strong, outspoken women, but publishing something like this, about your husband leaving you, was not something they would do. My mother had never spoken about her ex- partner’s multiple infidelities. Susan had covered for my father’s temper, for his pills, for his debt. We had all been taught to fill in the hole that men left, to be quiet about men behaving badly, to move on with grace. Publishing an account of what happened to me was shining a light on that hole, the deep crevice James had left. I was refusing something—the cleaning up, the grace.

My grandmother was still appearing in my dreams. I still woke up thinking about her. She had been devastated that a story about her husband’s affair had been made public. I wondered, Would she be horrified by this?

Horrified by me?

I paused. I showed the piece to the kids. I spoke to my lawyer. And then I decided to go ahead.

—

The editor of “Modern Love” and I went back and forth over email, working on my piece. The word count for publication was lower than the one allowed for submissions. We disagreed on some things. I held firm on language I wanted to stay. In March, we were close to finalizing the draft.

Then, by email, he told me that I needed to show the essay to James “to get his reaction.” He said that the standards editor of the paper required it.

James was not named in the piece, but he was easily identifiable with one Google search—our wedding announcement had been published in the Times in 1999. When the editor first contacted me, he told me that James would receive a fact-check call. I hadn’t understood that he would need to approve the piece as a whole, or I had missed it, this critical step in the process.

I wrote to the editor, “It seems like such a rule would silence many women writing about their own experience of an event.” I didn’t recognize this version of myself—a woman challenging a respected male editor.

He responded, “Showing him the essay and considering his response would be the beginning of the process, not the end.” In our exchange, the editor described my piece as “your account.” Suddenly, I felt doubted. Like what I had written might not be true. Like I could have made it all up.

I knew how it would play out. James would object, not to the substance (he could not contest the facts of it), but globally, to being written about at all. And the Times would drop the piece. They would not risk a lawsuit, especially when the subject was a wealthy man, a former lawyer. If this was the likely result, I could not risk inflaming him again.

I told the editor we were at an impasse. I could not elicit James’s reaction. He said he understood, but they would not change their process.

I had reached the end of the road. I had tried. The editor had thought it was good enough to publish and that would have to be enough.

—

I saw James again at Evie’s graduation from boarding school in May 2023.

She was allowed to have as many guests as she wanted. We no longer needed to wear masks. I did not wear black. It was a beautiful day.

When James arrived in his suit and tie, striding across the lawn, I noted that the rush of longing was still there, but it was brief, fleeting, nearly imperceptible. As we sat side by side in our row of folding chairs, I did not have any desire to hold his hand. My body was finally catching up.

—

In June 2023, my desire to publish my story did not go away. I could not let it go. It was the same feeling I had before filing my losing counterclaim—a rebelliousness, a desire to reclaim something that was mine, an internal drive to abandon the quiet, the submissiveness, that had not served me. I also knew, in my gut, that it had a greater purpose. This is going to help someone.

And I liked the essay. I had worked on it for more than a year. I wanted it to be read.

As I walked the West Side Highway, I thought, I am allowing myself to be silenced again. By a man.

And then, I have to send it to James. There is no other way.

I emailed James, “I’ve started writing again and it has been helpful to me. I wrote a piece about our divorce which I would like to publish. Do you

want to read it?”

He said yes. I sent it.

He didn’t answer for ten days. I wrote to him again.

He answered, “I haven’t been able to bring myself to read it. Are you critical of me?”

Before I could respond, he texted, “Your article is good, sad, hard to read, I’m supportive.”

I was stunned. I don’t know why he approved it. He may not have seen anything wrong with the story—a man was allowed to leave in the way he did. Or, maybe, possibly, he wanted to help me.

I took a screenshot of James’s text and sent it to the “Modern Love” editor. We spoke on the phone for the first time, for over an hour. He was kind and compassionate. He said he wanted me to add a line about my current contact with James. He was still concerned about being fair to him.

He asked, “How about, ‘We are in touch about arrangements for the kids’?”

I said, “Remember, there aren’t any arrangements. I have the kids all the time.”

He was stunned. Even in his compassion, even having edited my story, he had not quite believed it.

He said he would publish the piece in two weeks.

—

The essay went online at midnight on June 30, 2023. It would run in the hard copy of the Sunday paper on July 2.

I was on the Vineyard. The kids were away. Evie was traveling with friends. Carrie was on a teen tour. Finn had started a summer internship with a real estate firm. I sat in the living room in my pajamas and socks, in the chair by the fireplace where Carrie had sat upside down telling me she knew about her father’s affair. The dog slept on the floor next to me. I reloaded the page and waited for the essay to appear.

And then there it was. My name and my words in print. The artwork showed me in a dress looking at James on an island; the background was a dark pink, my favorite color when I was a kid. The editor had given the piece a new title: “Was I Married to a Stranger?”

I sat with the piece on my screen, by myself, for over an hour.

It was thrilling.

And then, like the moment I placed baby Evie on the floor in the same room, I thought, What have I done?

—

I had seen publication as a finish line. I didn’t imagine anything after that.

And somehow, I had not understood that I was putting both my story and my writing into the world for judgment.

Friends on the West Coast who were still awake, most of them college classmates who worked in the entertainment industry, texted me. They said that they loved it. They said they loved the writing.

I slept for a few hours and woke up to more emails and texts. Friends posted it on Instagram. Joyce Carol Oates, a regular reader of “Modern Love,” tweeted it. Two editors at big publishing houses reached out to say

how good they thought it was. Their approval, as arbiters of good writing, shook me. I thought, Maybe Greg was wrong?

My closest friends, my family, the people who had lived through the ordeal with me, who had called and texted me every day, were ebullient.

They had seen me at my lowest; they had talked to me from the bathroom floor, from my bed, when I couldn’t get up. This rising was, to them, beautiful and just.

My mother wrote, “You have spoken for so many women, including me, who have suffered the consequences of ruthless male prerogative and behavior. No more shutting up women about what men have always gotten away with. Rebirth! New life! I am so proud!”

I went out on the lawn with the dog, lying beside him on the cold, wet grass. When I looked up at the sky, at the house, I saw a swarm of dragonflies, dozens of them, moving as a mass from the roof to the pool, to me, and back again. I had never seen anything like it. They didn’t buzz, they vibrated, a ball of energy three feet wide, circling above me.

Later, I googled “swarm of dragonflies,” wondering if it signified something wrong with the house, with the ecosystem of the land. I found an answer I wasn’t expecting, from several sites. Dragonflies did not indicate danger. They were symbolic of self-actualization.

It was then that I said to myself, This is what was meant to happen. This was the only way I could get here.

—

Over the next few days, I received more than a hundred texts and emails, some sent to me directly, some forwarded from the “Modern Love” inbox.

Both men and women thanked me for writing the essay. Many wrote that the same thing had happened to them, or something similar—an abandonment, a lack of warning or explanation, gaslighting. One woman wrote, “Ms. Burden’s essay made me feel less alone—so she has, in fact, made a difference in my life.” Another wrote, “For many of us who have uncovered secret lives of our husbands/partners, experienced being cut off

and gaslighting when trying to seek answers and understanding—it is a lonely club and a situation where it is very difficult to avoid feeling shame.”

A man wrote, “A huge thank you, Belle, for this article. I, too, lived a similar experience and reading your piece on living with a stranger filled me with a sense of comfort. I appreciate the sharing of your experience, and please know, you have helped others.”

Some readers tried to help me understand what had happened. One reader alerted me to the phenomenon of “runaway husbands,” men who leave their wives without warning or explanation. Another reader, a woman, wrote, “I think that the reason you didn’t know who your husband was, is because he is not really able to deal with contradictions or uncertainties within himself. Therefore, he could be the Rebel, the Loyal Husband, and then the I Must Break Free to Be Myself Betrayer.” Her analysis felt true, even though she had never met James.

As the emails came in, I felt steadier in my decision to publish. I had made other people feel seen and acknowledged, and they had done the same for me. We had made each other feel less alone.

It wasn’t all positive. One woman wrote, “This seemed like more of a roast and ‘outing’ of her former spouse. Honestly just mean.” Another woman, a lawyer, addressed the impact on my children: “Belle, there is no excuse for you to involve your children publicly in the failure of your marriage.” One reader wrote, “I have to say this story is so polished it’s totally unbelievable.”

The article was reposted on online blogs, which looked like organized forums for bashing me. They did not hold back. I was called a “rich bitch” who “deserved to be left.” I was “ugly,” “fat,” a “hausfrau.” James was the hero, a man leaving an unhappy marriage to an awful person. One man posted that my writing was so bad, he couldn’t finish reading the essay.

Two days after my piece appeared online, the Daily Mail posted an article about me. Within a few hours, it rose to the top of their website. I had not anticipated this, but I probably should have. It listed my parents, my grandparents, the bold names, the ancestry of privilege. I was mortified.

The way it was written made my story, my decision to publish, seem

tawdry, vindictive, sad. I knew the Daily Mail article would come up whenever you googled me, for the rest of my life, right after my wedding announcement.

—

The timing of the article’s publication coincided exactly with the start of summer at the tennis club. I felt as vulnerable as I had in 2020, putting on my sneakers, making myself walk the club’s loop, not allowing myself to hide. I knew I was the subject of conversation. I knew the article was being forwarded around by text. I knew there would be opinions.

Three years earlier, in my rawness, I had been ultrasensitive to other people’s reactions to me, to the news of James leaving. I was buoyed and crushed in equal measure. And here I was, back in the same position. But this time, I had chosen it. This time, I had put myself in this place. This time, my fear of how people would react was dusted with something else: excitement, pride.

As in my darkest days, I was greeted with a lot of kindness. People went out of their way to stop me on the road, at cocktail parties. They sent congratulatory texts. They said they thought I was brave to do it. They said they loved the piece, the writing. All generations reached out, the oldest club members, the youngest teenagers. I nearly wept when they did. When they extended a hand.

But, as in 2020, I felt an undercurrent, a shadow, a different view.

Several men I knew well didn’t say anything to me about the article at all. I sensed a palpable discomfort, a desire to avoid me, like I was suddenly radioactive. Maybe these men hadn’t read the essay, maybe they had and were horrified, maybe they thought it was unfair to James, even though I had done everything possible to soften it. I didn’t know.

On the dock in the late afternoon, a man asked me if I had planted the

Daily Mail article.

I was astonished. “No, of course not!”

He shrugged and turned away.

—

The day the print version of the article appeared in the paper, I met a close friend at the clothing store where many women bought their summer dresses. She was tall, lithe, her hair in a pixie cut. She was in the dressing room when I arrived. I drew back the curtain a few inches. She looked stressed. She said, “I have to tell you, people are really gossiping about the

article.”

“What are they saying?” I asked.

She pulled a flowered dress over her head. She said, “I don’t want to tell you.”

I answered, “Come on. You have to tell me. And you have to tell me who is saying it.” I felt a fierceness rising in me, in defense of myself.

She listed a series of married names, all club members. As I heard each name, I felt like I was being stung—once, twice, three times.

She said, “They don’t understand why you would do it. They are shocked you would do it. It is shocking.”

I had always liked this friend’s honesty, her bluntness, and I liked that we sparred sometimes. She had been firmly supportive of me after James’s exit, never wavering. I knew I could have this conversation with her and still feel safe.

She continued, “I told them you did it because you wanted to be a

writer.”

“That’s not why I did it.”

She stepped into another dress. “Well, I also said it was cathartic for you to write about it.”

I’d heard the word cathartic several times. It felt demeaning, like I just needed to get my anger out of my system and then I would shut up. I don’t think anyone would have used the word to explain the motives of a male writer.

I said, “There are many easier ways to feel catharsis than trying to get published.”

She answered, “Then why? Everyone thinks it’s for revenge.”

Revenge felt even more demeaning than catharsis. It erased every other reason a woman might want to tell her story, every artistic purpose, and reduced it to only one thing: getting back at the man who had rejected her.

The “Modern Love” editor had told me they never publish pieces that ring of bitterness or vengeance. He said he had picked mine because it was not that. I had worked hard to remove any anger from the story, to keep my tone even and fair.

Still, I’d asked myself, Am I doing this to hurt James? I’d wanted James to understand what had happened after he left, to see the impact, to see me.

But isn’t that different from revenge?

In the store, I felt hot with anger. I was being shamed instead of celebrated on the day I first held my published article in my hand. I was being criticized for writing an honest account of what had happened to me and my kids. By my own community, by people I knew.

I dropped the curtain and walked out.

In my car, I tried to calm down. I knew my friend was the messenger of something I had felt but couldn’t identify—the counterview in the air. It was helpful to know exactly what was being said. And I should have expected it.

These are people who do not speak about private things.

These are people who do not air their dirty laundry.

—

A week later, during cocktails before a dinner party, another friend pulled me to the corner of the room. She was younger than I was and very kind.

She whispered the name of another married mother at the club. “She’s saying terrible things about you. It’s so upsetting.”

I sighed. “What is she saying?”

My friend’s eyes darted around the room, making sure no one was listening. “She’s talking about you as a mother. Saying that a good mother wouldn’t do this. They wouldn’t do it to their children.”

I knew this was a possibility, this view. But it still felt like a punch to the softest part of me. Bad mother. A good mother is meant to protect her kids at all costs. A good mother would never call out her children’s father publicly.

I didn’t answer my friend. I didn’t try to defend myself. My fire was gone. I couldn’t find any words that would absolve me.

—

As the summer progressed, I continued to absorb people’s reactions. The cloud of hurt threatened to consume me again, the sinking feeling that I would be alienated, judged, excluded. It felt so familiar, a particular pain that highlighted all I had lost, all that was missing, all that was wrong with me. In the dark of the night, I was my own harshest critic: You have embarrassed yourself. You are a selfish, vengeful person. You are a bad mother.

But in the morning, as I walked the loop I’d mapped in 2020, I was able to steer myself through it again, through the noise and opinions, reminding myself why I wrote the piece, why it mattered, why it wasn’t wrong.

I could see that the voice in my head, the one shaming me, had been there since I was a little girl, warning me against speaking up, especially about a man. I could see that the voice was sexist. I could see that it was silencing.

I could see that some people, both online and in person, were uncomfortable with me coming out of my lane, a place where women stayed quiet, where men are allowed to do what serves them, no matter what the wreckage. I could see they were defending something bigger, a way of life, the safety it gave them.

I could see that when I was told I was too upset, too hurt, too open— words used against me since the first days after James’s departure—it shifted the narrative. Once a woman is painted as a hysteric, the rest of the story is washed away.

I could see that many of my detractors had said nothing to me about James leaving. To them, a woman writing about a man leaving is, somehow, worse than the man leaving.

I started to tell myself what I should have known from the beginning: Some people will root for me. Some won’t.

When I wrestled with the harshest judgment leveled at me, the labeling of me as a bad mother, another voice started to emerge: What if telling the story publicly, saying what happened to us, actually helps my kids? What if seeing their mother rise, seeing her claim her life, giving clarity to their experience, is the greater gift?

Isn’t this possible too?

—

In the fall, I started digitizing the movies James had made of our family.

There were sixteen DVDs, each in a case with images of the kids on the cover. I wanted the kids to have permanent copies, especially as DVD players became obsolete.

I watched the movies before converting them. They tell the story of every year since Finn was born, every holiday, every vacation, every summer on the Vineyard. James rarely shows up in them; he is usually the one filming. He talks from behind the camera. There is a sweetness to his presence, watching over us, encouraging us. But there is something melancholy about it too. I can see that he was most comfortable at a remove, at a distance.

I felt a deep longing as I watched the movies, for those years with the kids, for their innocence, for the endless days I often dragged myself through, for all that slipped through my fingers. But I felt joy too, watching our family, the moments of pure, authentic happiness, the way James, even at a distance, is adoring of us, lingering on each member of his family— four-year-old Finn running down Chambers Street in a Batman costume, Evie smiling from her crib, Carrie covered in Mardi Gras beads in New Orleans. And me, carrying babies, cooking dinner, swimming in the ocean.

The movies feel like love.

A friend once asked what I would do with our wedding album, would I throw it away? Another friend asked if I had to rethink my memories with James, if his ultimate betrayal had cast a shadow over all that came before?

Even in my lowest moments, even in the nadirs of hurt and betrayal, I still believed in our love story, in our happiness as a family. Those stories are preserved in the words we wrote to each other, in the movies James made, in the albums I made, in the life we collected over the years. But they also exist in our kids’ minds, in their skin and bones, in their souls. And in mine. James changed our present and our future, but not our past. This is the gift of an abrupt departure, an exit with no lead-up or warning. He didn’t infect our lives with discord, with bickering, with visible discontent, before he left. He kept it lovely until he blew it up.

So, I answer, No, I will not throw our wedding album away. No, I do not rethink our memories together. They are true. And they are ours.