Pregnant When the Marriage Ended

The solicitor asked for my identification before he asked me to sit down.

I understood the confusion. My trainers were wet, my hair was held up with a pencil, and a corner of my dissertation protruded from my rucksack. Nothing about me suggested I had spent four years married to the man who controlled most of Greyhaven's waterfront.

"Mrs. Romano?" He compared the card with my face.

"Katherine Stone," I said. "I'd prefer Katherine."

He stopped looking at the identification.

On his desk lay the papers that would let me become that person again. No claim on the shipping companies. No claim on the houses, the private accounts, the armored cars. I had asked for my own name and nothing else.

"Your husband must sign the consent and the acknowledgment of service," he reminded me. "Then the waiting period begins. Until the decree is issued, you're still married."

"He'll sign."

It was the only part of my plan I had practiced.

At the house, the security team waved me through without interrupting their conversation. They would have searched a delivery van for an hour. Their employer's wife, apparently, presented no risk worth noticing.

I found Vincent Romano in the library.

Someone had put orange lilies beside his desk. Their scent reached me from the corridor, heavy and sweet. I had stopped bringing flowers home after our first anniversary because Vincent said they gave him headaches.

Diana Arden sat on the edge of the desk, trimming another stem with his letter opener.

"Too tall?" she asked him.

"Leave it."

He was smiling.

I stood there a moment longer than I meant to.

Diana had returned from Lisbon after her marriage collapsed. Her family owned the warehouses that made Vincent's legitimate freight business possible; their illegitimate arrangements went back even further. Since her return, business had become a reason for her to appear at breakfast, at midnight, and everywhere between.

She noticed me first.

"Katherine. We didn't hear you."

Vincent's smile settled into the expression I knew better.

"Do you need something?"

I set the folder between his elbow and the vase.

"A signature for the university. Fieldwork paperwork."

He reached for it, then paused.

"What fieldwork?"

My pulse kicked against my ribs. I had put the signature pages on top, with the identifying heading folded beneath the flap. Nothing would survive more than a few seconds of his attention.

"They need my next of kin to acknowledge the arrangements."

There was no one else I could name. My parents had died when I was seventeen, their car forced off a wet coastal road by a driver nobody ever identified. My father had driven for Vincent's father. Years earlier, he had taken a bullet meant for his employer, and the old man had repaid the debt by giving his orphaned daughter a room.

Vincent began lifting the first sheet.

Diana caught his wrist.

"Darling, she's submitting a form, not buying a port. Sign it before the flowers die of old age."

He let the page fall.

The nib scratched twice. His initials followed. I watched the ink settle into the places the solicitor had marked.

"Anything else?" Vincent asked.

"No."

Diana watched me close the folder.

"You do spoil her," she said to him. "All these little student emergencies. You're practically her guardian."

My husband said nothing.

I carried his signature out of the room.

Upstairs, I sat on the edge of our bed until my hands stopped shaking. I had imagined victory would feel warmer.

Once, Vincent had been the only person in this house who noticed when something hurt me.

I was twenty when one of his father's associates cornered me outside the pantry. I escaped with a cut high on my leg and a warning that charity cases should learn gratitude. Vincent came home that night with blood on his cuff, found me struggling with a bandage, and knelt on the kitchen tiles.

"Who did this?"

I told him. The associate never returned.

After he cleaned the wound, he stayed. When his hand covered mine, I held on. Three weeks later we were married. He called it a practical arrangement: his wife could not be threatened without consequences. I built a love story around what he had never promised.

There had been enough tenderness to make that possible. His hand at my waist in crowded rooms. The nights he reached for me before he was fully awake. A kiss behind a closed door, as though wanting me was a secret he enjoyed keeping.

Then Diana came back, and I discovered how much of a marriage could disappear without anybody announcing its departure.

At our last anniversary dinner, I waited in the Lantern Room until the staff began folding unused napkins. Nolan, Vincent's aide, arrived with a sapphire pendant and an explanation about a delayed shipment.

The next morning, a society photograph showed Vincent at a concert. Diana's cheek rested against his shoulder.

I put the pendant back in its box. The following day, I booked the solicitor.

Now I checked the signatures once more and slid the folder into my rucksack.

Twenty-eight days. That was all the law still required of me.

Vincent had given me permission to leave.

He simply hadn't read what he was permitting.