Inside the box sat a thick folder, and resting on top of it, a single manila envelope with his name written across the front in my handwriting. Dennis lifted the envelope with fingers that had gone unsteady. The guests leaned in, phones still raised, expecting something charming. He slid the papers out. Divorce filing. Already prepared, already signed by me, already reviewed by the attorney I had called from the lobby ten minutes earlier, the same attorney now standing quietly at the back of the room where Dennis couldn’t see her. “You wanted me to do something about myself,” I said, my voice steady and clear enough to carry. “So I did.”<\/p>\n
His mouth opened and closed. He flipped past the filing to the pages beneath it, and that was where the color truly left his face. Because underneath the divorce papers was the second half of my gift: printed bank statements, highlighted line by line. The secret account he’d been moving money into for three years. The “business trips” charged to a card he thought I never saw. The lease on an apartment across town in his name and someone else’s. I had known for months. I had simply been waiting for the right box to put it in. “I stopped crying in bathrooms about a year ago, Dennis,” I said. “That’s when I started reading the mail.”<\/p>\n
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