It was officially a week after that night and if someone told me things would get this bad, I wouldn’t have believed them.
Arden moved out of our room the morning after that confrontation and that was the least of the awful things he’s done within the week that followed. On the second day, I mustered up enough courage to ask him and his response was simply that he wasn’t planning to share a bed with an unfaithful woman any longer, and then he shut the door. That sentence hurt me more than I would ever admit and I cried myself to sleep, wondering if I was losing my mind, or I’d done what he was accusing me of and completely lost my memory of it.
I went back downstairs and stood in the kitchen for a long time, my hand flat against the cold marble counter because I didn't trust my legs to carry me anywhere.
By the second week, Arden had stopped pretending he cared whether I noticed his escapades or not.
One Thursday night, close to midnight, I heard his car pull into the driveway. A few minutes later, I heard two sets of footsteps and a woman's laughter coming from the floor below. I sat in bed staring at the wall and told myself I had misheard.
I hadn't actually and I knew that for a fact, but it was more comforting to pretend it was all in my head.
The laughter came again, followed by footsteps heading toward the guest wing. I pulled the pillow over my head and stayed there until the house went quiet. I refused to go downstairs and see who she was.
Three days later, I didn't have a choice but to be met face to face with the evidence that my marriage was in literal shambles.
I passed a woman in the hallway on her way out. She was carrying her heels in one hand, her hair slightly messy, and when she saw me, she gave me a look that made my face burn.
I said nothing to her and decided to confront Arden himself.
"Do you have to bring them here?" I asked. He was in the study, going through papers, and he didn't even look up. "This is still my house too, Arden. Whatever you think of me. You could at least—"
"At least what? Spare your feelings?" Now he looked up, and there was something almost amused in his expression. "I wasn't aware you still had those where I was concerned."
"That's not fair."
"Isn't it?" He set his pen down. "You want me to be considerate of your feelings in a marriage you already ended the moment you decided to sleep with someone else. I don't think you get to make that request, Faouzia."
"I never…" I stopped myself, because I had said it so many times by then, I never slept with anyone, I have no idea what you're accusing me of, and it had never made any difference, and I was so tired.
The tiredness was becoming more noticeable but I put it down to the stress at first. I told myself the nausea in the mornings, the way certain smells — coffee, of all things, coffee I used to love — made my stomach turn, the exhaustion that had me falling asleep at my sketch desk, all of it was just what happens to a person whose marriage is collapsing around her one humiliating day at a time.
It was until my sister-in-law's old assistant looked at me a certain way the day I ran into her at the pharmacy where I came to get something for the headache and said, "How far along are you?" I found myself laughing because the question sounded absurd.
"I'm not pregnant." was my response.
She shrugged and went back to her shopping. But the question followed me home, and that night I did the math in my head, counted backward, and realized with a cold drop in my stomach that I couldn't remember the last time I'd needed to buy anything for my period.
I bought the test the next day, at a different pharmacy, in a different part of the city, wearing sunglasses indoors like some kind of criminal, because the last thing I needed was for anyone to see Arden Whitmore's wife buying a pregnancy test and putting two and two together before I'd even had the chance to do the math myself.
I took it in the bathroom on the ground floor, the one we never used, and I sat on the edge of the tub with my elbows on my knees, watching the two minutes count down on my phone like it was the longest two minutes of my life.
It was positive.
I stared at the little pink line for so long that the timer on my phone went off and I actually jumped, because I'd genuinely forgotten I was waiting for anything. My hand went to my stomach, it was still flat, but the test had confirmed it. I was pregnant with Arden’s and my baby.
I almost let myself be happy about the news. It would have felt great to tell Arden about it, would have been great to imagine our future with our child.
Then I remembered the photographs. I remembered his voice telling me he wasn't going to let me play the victim. I remembered the woman's laugh drifting up to our bedroom.
The happiness went out of me like someone had opened a window in the middle of winter.
If Arden knew, he wouldn't see a baby. He would see proof. Confirmation of whatever story he'd already decided was true, and I understood, sitting there on the edge of that bathtub with a positive test in my shaking hand, that I had two options. I could tell him, and watch him look at my stomach the way he'd looked at those photographs, already deciding whose child this was and building a case against me before I'd even finished the sentence. Or I could say nothing at all.
I wrapped the test in tissue and buried it at the bottom of the bathroom trash, under the used cotton pads and empty packaging, and I went and sat in our room with my hand pressed to my stomach and made a decision that felt, in that moment, like the only solid thing left in my life.
He would not know, not yet at least. Maybe not ever, if it came to that.
I couldn;t let my child be born into a home where her father was unfaithful, I would not allow that.
Three days later, I filed for divorce. I had the papers drawn up quietly, through a lawyer two cities over who had never heard of Arden Whitmore and didn't care that he had, and I brought them home in a plain folder then set them on his desk in the study while he was reading through some quarterly report.
He looked at the folder, then at me.
"What is this?"
"You can read, Arden."
He opened it. I watched his eyes move down the first page, and I watched his jaw tighten the way it did when he was working very hard to control his reaction.
"You're serious."
"I've never been more serious about anything."
He closed the folder and set it down like it had offended him just by existing on his desk. "This is what you do. After everything. You get to sit there and act wounded, and the second things get uncomfortable for you, you run."
"I'm not running from anything. I'm leaving a marriage where my husband won't even tell me what I'm accused of."
"You know what you're accused of."
"I don't!" The word tore out of me louder than I meant it to, my voice cracking. "I have asked you a hundred times, Arden, a hundred times, tell me what I did, and you have never once told me, because there is nothing to tell, because I didn't do anything—"
"Stop." He said it quietly. "I'm not doing this again."
"Then don't act shocked when I sign these." My hands were shaking, but my voice, somehow, wasn't. "You didn't want a wife. You wanted someone to punish. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life being punished for something I never did."
"You think this is petty of me? You think I'm the one being unreasonable?" He laughed, short and humorless. "You cheat, and I'm the villain for reacting. That's rich, even for you."
"I never cheated on you." I said it slowly this time, carefully, like maybe if I said it slow enough it would finally get through to him. "I have never touched another man since the day I married you. I don't know what you saw, or what you were told, or who convinced you otherwise, but it is not true, and I am so tired, Arden. I am so tired of saying it and watching you decide not to believe me."
"Sign the papers if that's what you want," he said. "You'll be back in a month."
I picked up the pen from his desk, and I signed my name on the line, and I didn't let my hand shake while I did it, even though everything in me was shaking. Arden watched me do it with an expression I couldn't quite read, more like disbelief, like he genuinely hadn't thought I would go through with it, like some part of him had been so certain of me even while accusing me of the worst thing he could imagine.
"You're not going anywhere," he said, when I set the pen down. "You'll calm down in a few days."
I didn't answer him. I walked out of the study and didn't look back.
I packed that night, after he'd gone out.. I moved through the house I had decorated with my own hands, room by room, and took only what was important. My passport. The folder of documents. The small amount of money I'd quietly set aside over the years without ever telling him. My sketchbooks, some designs I'd abandoned when marriage and Arden's schedule and Arden's dinners and Arden's world had slowly eaten up all the hours I used to spend at my desk.
I cried while I packed. I stood in the doorway of our bedroom for a long moment before I left it for the last time, looking at the bed we used to share, the reading lamp on his side that he never turned off before falling asleep mid-sentence, the closet where half my clothes still hung, and I thought about how completely I had let this house become the only shape my life had. I had no mother to call. No father since he'd passed. No siblings who'd have room for a grown woman and her sketchbooks. I had built an entire existence around one man, and now I was leaving with two suitcases, and there was no one on the other end of any phone call I could make who would understand.
Before I left, I stopped in the hallway and put my hand over my stomach, still flat, still giving nothing away.
"I don't know what's going to happen," I whispered to the baby who couldn't hear me yet. "But you are never going to grow up thinking this is what love looks like. You're never going to watch your mother beg to be believed. I promise you that."
I booked the first flight I could get a seat on, three hours later, to a city I had never been to and knew no one in, because that felt safer somehow than going somewhere familiar, somewhere Arden might think to look. I cried through most of the flight, my forehead against the cold window, watching the lights of the city that had been my whole life shrink and disappear beneath the clouds.
I spent the first night in a cheap hotel near the airport, too exhausted to think past finding a bed. The next morning, red-eyed and running on almost no sleep, I found a small apartment two neighborhoods over from the hotel, paid the first month in cash, and stood in the middle of the empty living room listening to my own footsteps echo off bare walls.
That evening, I sat on the floor because I didn't have furniture yet, opened my sketchbook to a blank page, and picked up my pencil.
I had lost my marriage. I had lost the house, the name, the life I'd spent years building around someone else's needs.
But I still had this. My hand still knew how to move across a page.
If I had to rebuild everything else from nothing, I would start with the one part of myself I had never really lost. I had only put it aside while I was busy trying so hard to be loved
