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be weak, to remember.

Chapter Five
    Hitting her like a slap to the throat, Gary’s words choked Chloe.
    It took her a minute to even manage a response. “A divorce?”
    “Yeah, a divorce. I don’t want to be married anymore.”
    She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t stand. Couldn’t think. This wasn’t happening. Not to her. They weren’t even fighting. Didn’t you have to be fighting for your husband to ask for divorce?
    “I’ve been seeing someone for a while. She’s nice, I met her at work and…” The buzzing drowned out his words, as if her ears were full of bees. Her knees, suddenly unable to support her weight, bent and she felt the cement curb under her ass jar her spine as if it were a punch to the base of her skull. She realized she’d been holding her breath and sucked in air.
    “You’d like her.” His words penetrated the haze.
    “What?” Tears blurred her vision, not that her view of his knees was interesting, anyway. “What in the hell makes you think I’d like some whore you’re fucking, some bitch you’re replacing me with?” She regretted the venomous words as soon as they were spoken and rubbed her face, as if to erase them.
    “Don’t make this harder than it has to be, Chloe.”
    Don’t make this harder? He cheated on her, he was dumping her and he didn’t want her to make it harder? Harder for whom? Him? “I can’t be a divorced person.” It’s not in my plan.
    “Let’s not dramatize this.”
    He seemed so calm. She wanted to hit him. To hurt him. To beg him not to do it. She couldn’t stop the tears. They kept coming, kept flooding down her cheeks like some waterfall of sadness. This wasn’t really happening. “You don’t mean it. You asked me to marry you. We were going to start a family. Why would you ask me to—?”
    Meeting his eyes, she searched for an answer, but he interrupted her with a shrug. “I didn’t think you’d say yes. You don’t love me, Chloe. Never really did, which was fine in the beginning. We wanted the same things and I thought we didn’t need love, not like that. As to kids, I think we both know that’s not happening.”
    Slick. She’d thought him so clever, obviously headed places with all his ambition. Together, they would make a difference which they had all planned out. Or maybe he really would just go.
    Opening and closing her mouth, she took the new blows, adding them to the injury. Didn’t think she’d say yes? What, when he proposed? And the kids bit—she didn’t want to miscarry. Three babies started to grow inside her, three deaths she carried long after the possibility of children passed.
    “Look, I’m going to go.” He shuffled his weight side to side and she could tell he was moments away from leaving her.
    For good.
    Panic, rich and coated in adrenaline, flooded her and she reached for him, numb fingers clutching the denim covering his legs. It was like reliving her childhood nightmare. She had planned, made sure this would never happen to her. “Don’t go. We can talk. We can fix this. Let me fix this.”
    “Yeah, no.” He stepped away from her grasping hands.
    Her heart thumped so hard, she thought it might explode in her chest.
    She couldn’t be divorced. She planned her life. She fixed things. This wasn’t supposed to happen to her, too. She wasn’t like her mother.
    His shiny sports car, the perfect car for a future politician sitting so neatly in their perfect driveway, fired up and she watched him peel out. Just like her daddy, so long ago. These things happened to other women, not her. She was twenty-five, she had plans and goals, and her marriage was a cornerstone of those ideas.
    Somehow, she managed to get to her feet. To stumble into the house. To make it to the bedroom to lie and stare at the wall. The sobs didn’t stop, the rearranging of her life and her plans an impossibility, while everything she thought she knew crumbled. Not sure how much time passed, a hand on her shoulder broke the endless