Allison, tucked closely beside him, let her fingers—painted a glossy, aggressive crimson—rest lightly on the sleeve of Jason’s tailored suit jacket. She tilted her head, adopting an expression of profound, manufactured sorrow. Her voice was spun sugar. Anyone eavesdropping from the adjacent booths would have assumed she was a grief counselor doing the Lord’s work.
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“Cat, you can’t force the heart,” Allison murmured, her brow furrowed in faux sympathy. “If your love has run its course, it’s healthier to just let the tether snap. What Jason and I have… it’s undeniable.”
I stared at the face I had known since we were trading bruised apples in the third grade. I looked at the mouth that had devoured slices of my mother’s pecan pie at our cramped kitchen table. I searched the eyes that had flooded with genuine tears when she held me in the waiting room of the cardiology ward five years ago.
I couldn’t find my best friend anywhere in that face. Sitting before me was merely a parasite, utilizing a whisper-soft voice to mask the victorious gleam radiating from her pupils.
The café was muted enough that our immediate neighbors were undeniably tuned in. They kept their faces angled toward their laptops, but the frequency of their keystrokes had slowed. Their sidelong glances scraped against our drama before darting away.
Jason drummed his knuckles against the table, his impatience leaking through the veneer of civility. “I’ve instructed my counsel to be generous. The real estate is split down the middle, per standard equity. The liquid assets are halved. I’m not tossing you out onto the street empty-handed. Making a hysterical scene here isn’t going to bump up your margin.”
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I dropped my eyes back to the contract. The ambient temperature in the room seemed to plummet, freezing the blood in my fingertips, yet my mind was operating with terrifying, crystalline lucidity.
This absolute clarity hadn’t materialized out of thin air. It hadn’t birthed itself in this coffee shop, nor did it spark on the afternoon I first uncovered their rot. It had germinated three months ago, on a rainy Thursday when Allison had appeared on my doorstep dragging a cream-colored polycarbonate suitcase. Her eyes had been bloodshot, her lips trembling as she spun a tale about a brutal breakup and an eviction.
Stay in the guest room as long as you need, I had told her, hauling her heavy luggage over my threshold. That’s the baseline of friendship.
Ninety days later, she was caressing the wool of my husband’s jacket with the unconscious, practiced ease of a woman who had staked her claim a long time ago.
I placed my palm flat against the divorce decree and slid it back across the glass. “I’m not signing.”
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Computer Science
