Page 32 of Letting Go

“Absurd. I know. But hear me out.” She leans in, voice low and sly. “You don’t have to love him. You don’t even have to like him. Just lay on the waterworks. Make him feel guilty. Like he has a chance at redemption. That he might win you back if he plays nice.”

“…So, you want me to manipulate him.”

“Yes.”

I blink. “I have no problem with that.”

“Good.” She smiles. “Because there’s more. You can’t block him.”

“I…excuse me?”

“No blocking. No ghosting. You need open channels. Let him text you. Let him beg. Let him confess. You’re giving him rope, Leni. He’ll hang himself with it.”

I stare at her, mouth slightly open. “You are terrifying.”

“I’m your friend.”

“Same thing, in this case.”

She flips to a fresh page. “Now. Your sister. You said she’s nineteen?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Any chance this started before she was legal? Even just flirting, texts, DMs?”

I hesitate, stomach turning. “I don’t know.”

“Find out.”

I swallow hard. “I’ll try.”

Lorna keeps writing. “Good. Because if we can prove grooming or even inappropriate contact before she turned eighteen, he’s not just losing the house. He’s getting scorched earth.”

I sit back, winded, and suddenly the wine hangover from last night creeps in like smoke under a door.

After answering a million more questions about prenups, we don’t have one; his salary, it was less than mine; and other questions I walk out of Lorna’s office into the crisp noon air with a half-formed plan and the distinct sensation that I might throw up in a decorative planter.

Elegant. She wants me to be elegant.

Meanwhile, I’m one coffee and a stable nervous system away from setting Mike’s favourite vintage records on fire and mailing him the ashes in a Tiffany box.

But no. No arson. Not yet.

I have to play the long game. The strategic game. The equitable game.

Which means step one: find out if my husband is not just a cheating bastard, but a legally actionable one.

God.

Keira.

Even thinking her name makes my stomach twist. My sister. Nineteen. A baby. Stupid, reckless, too impressionable for her own good. But also, old enough to know better. And he is thirty-one and charming in that clean-cut, Midwestern boy who went to private school way.

I walk until my legs ache, past office towers and coffee shops and happy couples who don’t know their lives can implode on a Tuesday. I end up at a corner café I used to study in during law school. I order a large iced matcha and stare at my phone for a solid ten minutes at the hundred texts she has sent me since last night.

They’re all the same version of I’m sorry and I didn’t mean to and I don’t know how it happened.

Yeah?

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