⸻
"So what, you're just going to hold this against me forever?" she asked.
⸻
"I'm not holding anything against you," I said. "I'm telling you clearly what I understand now, that I probably should have understood considerably earlier in six years of marriage. You married the life my income provided. The moment that income looked uncertain, even for a single evening, you left without asking a single question."
⸻
"I love you," she said, though her voice had lost most of its earlier conviction.
⸻
"I believe you love the version of this marriage that never asks you to actually show up during a difficult moment," I said. "I don't think that's the same thing as loving me."
⸻
Delphine sat down slowly in the armchair across from me, working through, I imagine, the full weight of a marriage suddenly requiring more honesty than either of us had managed in six comfortable years.
⸻
"What are you saying, exactly?" she asked.
⸻
"I'm saying I want a divorce," I said, the words considerably steadier coming out than I expected them to be, given how thoroughly they'd been building over the past three days.
"Weldon, you can't be serious. Over one bad reaction?"
⸻
"It wasn't one bad reaction," I said. "It was six years of comfortable assumptions finally getting tested, and failing completely, the first single time either of us actually needed the other one to show up without a financial safety net attached."
⸻
She left that afternoon, considerably quieter than the fury she'd arrived with, the printed papers still sitting on my coffee table where she'd left them.
⸻
I filed for divorce the following week, working with an attorney through a straightforward process, given how clearly our finances and assets had always been structured in my name from the beginning of our marriage.
⸻
I accepted the Draymond position two weeks later, a considerable step up from my role at Halbrook, and used part of my severance to finally take the solo trip to the mountains I'd been quietly wanting to take for years, something Delphine had never once shown any interest in joining me for.
⸻
Delphine tried reaching out twice more over the following months, each time with a slightly different version of an apology, working through what I understood, eventually, was less about genuinely reckoning with what she'd done and more about testing whether the door had actually closed as firmly as I'd told her it had.
