Chapter 4 - The Life He Had Called Predictable
The divorce became final in early spring.
Ben moved into a penthouse near Northline’s headquarters.
At first, he seemed almost lighter.
He started attending dinners he had once declined.
He went skiing with clients.
His social circle expanded.
He was photographed at a charity event with a beautiful commercial designer named Cassandra Reed.
I saw the picture while drinking coffee in my office.
My assistant, Erin Mallory, watched me carefully.
“Do you want me to close it?”
“No.”
“Are you okay?”
I studied Ben’s smile.
“I think I am.”
That surprised me.
A month earlier, seeing another woman touch his sleeve might have destroyed me.
Now I mostly felt tired.
So I began changing my own life.
Not dramatically.
That was the first thing I learned.
Freedom did not need to look like champagne, nightclubs, or twenty-year-old men.
Sometimes freedom looked like turning off my phone at six.
Sometimes it looked like eating pizza on the floor with my children.
Sometimes it meant telling a board member, “No, that meeting can wait until Monday.”
I hired a stronger management team at Kendall Ridge.
I started painting again, badly.
I took Sadie to a pottery class where we produced two bowls that resembled collapsed hats.
I let Miles teach me a video game and pretended not to notice when he let me win.
And slowly, the woman Ben remembered at eighteen began appearing again.
Not because she had been waiting under the responsible wife.
Because I finally had room to meet the thirty-year-old version of her.
Then there was Nathan Cole.
Nathan was twenty-seven, an independent film producer whose company had pitched Kendall Ridge for financing.
He was funny, ambitious, impulsive, and incapable of walking past a bakery without buying something.
After our investment closed, he invited me to dinner.
I knew what he meant.
I went anyway.
For several weeks, we had dinners and saw two Broadway shows.
Nathan never pressured me.
One Saturday, he suggested we drive to an amusement park in New Jersey.
“Roller coasters,” he said. “Fried dough. Bad decisions.”
I laughed.
“That sounds exhausting.”
“Then no roller coasters.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Laura, I’m inviting you to spend time with me, not auditioning you for a personality.”
That sentence stayed with me.
I went.
We rode the Ferris wheel.
I watched families moving below us like bright dots.
Nathan glanced at me.
“You’re thinking about him.”
“I’m thinking about myself.”
“That sounds healthier.”
I smiled.
“I agreed to see you partly because I wanted to know whether Ben was right.”
“About what?”
“That adulthood had made me boring.”
Nathan looked genuinely offended.
“You run an investment firm, raise two kids, survived a public divorce, and ate a funnel cake without getting powdered sugar on a white sweater.”
He pointed at me.
“That last one alone is elite-level skill.”
I laughed harder than I had in months.
Then I became serious.
“I don’t think I want excitement all the time.”
“Most sane people don’t.”
“I like quiet.”
“Quiet isn’t the same as empty.”
That was when I understood.
Ben’s mistake had never been wanting more joy.
His mistake was believing joy had to exist somewhere else.
I ended things with Nathan kindly a week later.
He hugged me.
“For what it’s worth, I think the next person you choose is going to have a terrifyingly high bar.”
“There may not be a next person.”
“Also valid.”
Two nights after that, I came home to find Ben’s black SUV outside.
He was there for the children.
He saw me carrying flowers Nathan had sent after our final dinner.
His eyes fixed on them.
“Who gave you those?”
I almost smiled.
“Someone.”
“How long have you been seeing someone?”
“Why?”
“Because I’m their father.”
“The flowers do not have custody rights, Ben.”
His jaw tightened.
“You know what I mean.”
“No. I actually don’t.”
He stepped closer.
“Are you serious about him?”
I stared at him.
“You asked me for freedom without using the word. I gave it to you.”
His expression hardened.
“I’m not trying to control you.”
“You’re questioning me at my front door because a man sent me flowers.”
“What if he meets the kids?”
“He hasn’t.”
“What if—”
“Stop.”
He fell silent.
“You don’t get to leave our marriage because it feels too predictable and then expect me to remain emotionally parked where you left me.”
His face went pale.
“That isn’t what I want.”
“What do you want?”
Once again, Benjamin Kendall had no answer.
Only this time, his silence hurt him more than it hurt me.
He looked through the doorway.
Sadie was laughing somewhere inside.
Miles was shouting at a basketball game on television.
Dinner smelled faintly of garlic and rosemary.
Ordinary life.
The life he had once called repetitive.
Ben stared past me for several seconds.
Then he whispered, “I miss this.”
I looked at him.
“You had it.”
He closed his eyes.
May you like
“I know.”
The first crack in him appeared that night.
