Ex Wife's Collapse After Divorce novel Chapter 80

Chapter 80

Ethan drove across Crestwood without looking back.

By the time he pulled into the parking lot of Maple Grove Residences, the sky had turned black. The building stood in the middle of a quiet, middle-class neighborhood, clean and well managed, with grocery stores, cafés, and a subway station within walking distance.

It fit his position at Stellaris perfectly.

A deputy director in the marketing department could live here without drawing attention. The apartment was spacious enough that nobody would call it pathetic. It was also far enough from Aurora’s villa that Julian Blackwood would have no reason to show up at his door.

The only thing that hadn’t gone to plan was the unit itself.

He’d wanted a one-bedroom. Something small, something simple. But by the time he arrived, every one- bedroom in the building had already been let, and he needed to move in that same night. So he’d taken a two-bedroom instead.

It wasn’t what he’d imagined. But standing in the empty second room, hands in his pockets, he decided it

didn’t much matter.

It can be a guest room, then.

It was Friday. So Ethan did something he hadn’t let himself do in a very long time.

He went out.

He ate at a place with no reservation and no dress code, ordered whatever he wanted, and finished it without checking his phone once. He drank. He wandered the night market on Riverside, let the noise and the grease-smoke and the shouting hawkers wash over him, bought things he didn’t need from stalls he’d never see again.

For five years with Vivian, every dinner had been a performance. He had forgotten, somewhere in all of it, that a Friday night could simply belong to a person.

The weekend went the same way.

He slept late. He walked when he felt like walking and stopped when he felt like stopping. On Saturday he did something almost childish-he toured his own city like a stranger, riding to the top of the observation deck at the CBD, drifting through the old jewelry district, standing a long while on the bridge over the river as the lights came on across the water.

He was going to leave Crestwood soon. He knew that. When all of this was finished, there would be bigger boards to play on, other cities, other wars.

So he memorized it. The skyline. The smell of the water. The particular gray of the morning fog.

Remember it, he told himself, the way it looked before.

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Strange. After he’d walked away from Vivian, he’d expected to feel hollowed out. Instead, the weekend had felt like the lightest two days of his adult life.

Then it was Monday.

The city hall’s registry office was cold and bright and smelled of floor polish.

Vivian was already there when he arrived, seated with her spine perfectly straight. She didn’t look wounded. She looked so satisfied.

Because the terms were good. Better than good.

Aurora had drafted the divorce agreement herself. The property division was laid out so cleanly.

Vivian took what the paper said she was owed-all of her shares in Lockwood Industries, every last one, signed back into her own name.

And she took nothing else.

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