Dump My Slow-Mo Husband – Epilogue – How To Divorce Your Husband
I am barefoot in the passenger seat of my husband’s car at two in the morning.
One heel is somewhere at the Harrington’s garden party. Jason Calloway’s jacket is on my shoulders. My mascara has made a decision and the decision is cheekbones. I am talking – I know I am talking too much because I always talk too much when I’ve had champagne, which is a fact about me that Eric knows and has never once used against me, which is either very kind or very telling depending on the chapter.
He is driving.
He has not said anything in eleven minutes.
His jaw has a quality I have never seen on it before, which is remarkable because I have been studying this man’s face since I was twelve years old with the focused dedication of someone who should probably have channeled that energy elsewhere.
Both hands are on the wheel.
Eric Davies does not put both hands on the wheel. Eric Davies drives the way he does everything – with one hand, slightly bored, completely in control, as if the car and the road and the general concept of traffic have already agreed to cooperate with him.
Both hands. Ten and two. Knuckles approximately the color of the interior.
I watch him for a moment.
“Are you angry?” I ask.
“No,” he says.
He is lying. Eric is a terrible liar when he has actually decided to lie, which is rare, which is how I can always tell.
I look out the window at the city.
I think: it took another man putting his jacket on my shoulders for my husband to notice I had shoulders.
Four years of marriage. Four years of trying to make this man fall in love with me. Four years of elegant dinners and silk robes and performing the most composed, polished, relentlessly appropriate version of myself, and none of it – not one dinner, not one robe, not one single carefully orchestrated moment – produced the expression that is currently on Eric Davies’ face because Jason Calloway offered me his jacket when it got cold on a terrace.
I look back at him.
His hands tighten on the wheel.
I think: I tried to make him divorce me.
This is a sentence I will have to explain eventually.
It’s a long story.
It involves a plan that did not work, a best friend who found the entire thing too funny, several spectacular miscalculations, one stunning dress worn entirely by accident, and a man who took four years to notice me and apparently intends to make up for the delay through the application of both hands on a steering wheel and a jaw that could cut glass.
My name is Jane.
I married Eric Davies at twenty because our fathers made a joke at a dinner party that two wealthy families converted into a legal document in two weeks flat, and I said yes with the suppressed enthusiasm of someone who had been waiting for this specific outcome since the seventh grade.
He said yes because he didn’t not agree.
This is the story of what happened in the four years between that yes and other yes.
How To Divorce Your Husband.
A Failure In 24 Chapters.