Chapter 1: The Severing
My name was Clara Jensen. I was thirty-four years old the night my reality fractured, and if anyone had warned me even a week prior that I would be effectively divorced before the morning sun crested the horizon, I would have laughed until my ribs ached.
It wasn’t that Ethan Jensen and I existed in a state of breathless romance. We didn’t. Perhaps we hadn’t for longer than my pride cared to admit. But we were functional. We were polished in that insidious, comfortable way long-term partnerships often become when the two people inside them master the choreography of normalcy. We possessed a pristine brick colonial on a slumbering street in the northern suburbs of Chicago, a kitchen outfitted with the soft-close cabinets I had meticulously selected, and a color-coded digital calendar dictating our lives. From the manicured front lawn, our marriage expertly mimicked a life.
At 2:47 a.m. on a Tuesday, laughter was entirely extinct within me.
I had succumbed to exhaustion on the downstairs sofa, the television muted while an absurd infomercial painted the living room in a ghostly, silver luminescence. Ethan was supposed to be navigating a corporate conference in Las Vegas. He had brushed his lips against my cheek before departing that morning, slung his overstuffed carry-on over his shoulder, and murmured, “Don’t wait up if my flight gets in weird.”
It was a mundane string of words. Yet, if a microscopic tremor of guilt had infected his tone, I had successfully ignored it. Women are conditioned from childhood to smother their intuition whenever the ugly truth threatens to be inconvenient.
