Chapter 1 - The Fourteenth Tile
The linoleum in Room 204 was the shade of dried oatmeal, scuffed at the seams where three decades of boots, heels, and court-mandated loafers had ground grit into the wax. There were fourteen tiles between the toe of my black flat and the baseboard beside the metal trash bin. I knew the number because while Grant signed his surname with that wide, showy flourish he had practiced on cocktail napkins during his first year in commercial real estate, I did not look at his hand. I did not look at his cuff links, which were the brushed-pewter ones I had purchased for him at a craft market in Yellow Springs when Ellie was still nursing in the back seat of our beat-up Civic. I looked at the floor and counted. One, two, three, four.
Deb, the clerk, wore half-moon spectacles tethered to her neck by an acrylic chain of turquoise beads that clattered against the plastic edge of her desk every time she stamped a sheet. She smelled of toasted bran flakes and the damp wool of an umbrella leaning behind the door. She had stamped four copies already: one for the county clerk’s archive, one for the domestic relations registry, one for Grant’s attorney, and one for me. The ink was purple, wet, and slightly smeared at the lower margin where the county seal was embossed into the grain of the pulp.
"Bennett," Deb said. Her voice had the flat, dry timber of someone who had watched three hundred couples dismantle their households since the previous April. "You take the blue copy, sir. Ma’am, you take the pink. If you need certified duplicates for the Social Security office or the motor vehicle bureau, there’s an eight-dollar charge at window six downstairs. Cash or money order only. We don't take personal checks from people with active dissolution decrees."
"Understood," Grant said. He was already standing. His blazer was navy linen, unwrinkled, cut narrow through the waist to show off the twenty pounds he had dropped during his three months of morning spin classes at the club on Riverside. He smelled of sandalwood pomade and clean linen detergent—the brand Tessa used, not the scent-free bulk jugs I kept stacked beside the washer in our basement on Elmwood.
He did not tuck his copy into a folder. He folded it once, roughly, down the middle, cracking the seal, and shoved it into the breast pocket of his coat so that the pink corner of my copy, which lay on the table between us, seemed dull by comparison.
"Nora," he said.
I looked up. The light fixture directly above us hummed with an uneven sixty-cycle buzz that made the skin between my eyebrows itch.
"Yes, Grant?"
"The garage door remote on the sunroom side," he said. His voice was bright, brisk, entirely stripped of the gravelly weight it used to have when we were lying in bed on Sunday mornings debating whether to make blueberry pancakes or let the girls jump between our pillows. "Leave it on the granite island when you clear out the hall closet on Friday. The listing agent needs both remotes before the afternoon showing. And make sure you take the girls' trikes out of the tool shed. I don't want the appraiser deducting for clutter in the outbuildings."
"The trikes are already gone," I told him. My voice sounded flat in my own ears, like a voice recorded on tape thirty years ago and played back through an old speaker. "My brother took them to his garage on Sunday."
"Good," he said. He reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out his phone. The screen illuminated his face with a pale blue rectangle. He smiled—not the guarded, nervous smirk he had worn during our three mandatory mediation sessions with Judge Miller, but the loose, easy grin he used to give the television when Ohio State scored on a kickoff return. He answered before the first ring had finished vibrating against his palm.
"Hey," he said into the mouthpiece. He turned his shoulder toward Deb’s filing cabinets, lowering his chin slightly, though the room was small enough that every syllable bounced off the cinder block. "It’s done. Signed nine seconds ago. No issues. The magistrate didn't even come out from chambers. Deb just stamped it." A short pause. His thumb stroked the leather edge of his phone case. "Is your appointment still at eleven? Good. Tell Dr. Morrison we’re bringing an entourage. My mother’s already in the waiting room with two dozen mini-muffins from the bakery on third. She bought blue ribbon. Yes, really. Blue ribbon for the basket."
Deb tore a yellow slip from her ledger, slid it across the wood, and looked through me as if I were a pane of greenhouse glass that needed washing. "Take this to window six if you want the seal certified, ma'am."
"Thank you, Deb," I said.
Grant hung up. He did not put the phone away. He held it in both hands, his thumbs hovering over the glass, waiting for the next notification to pop.
"Tessa’s having a boy," he said. He didn't look at me when he said it; he looked at his screen, where a small green dot was blinking beside her name. "The early blood panel came back ninety-nine percent sure, but Morrison’s doing the anatomy scan this morning to verify the pelvic structure and the heart chambers. My dad took the morning off from the dealership. First time in six years he hasn't been on the showroom floor by nine."
"Congratulations," I said.
"My parents are thrilled," he continued, as though he hadn't heard me speak at all. "At least something good came out of this mess."
This mess. Eleven years of my life. Eleven years of measuring flour into chipped bowls for church bake sales so his mother could claim her daughter-in-law was a traditional girl from good stock. Eleven years of sanding the baseboards in that drafty two-story colonial on Elmwood until my knees were scabbed and my fingernails were split down to the quick because he wanted the original white oak preserved for the resale value. The nursery had three coats of primer under the pale butter yellow I had painted while seven months pregnant with Ellie, because the plaster was old and sweat from the horsehair backing kept bleeding through the lime.
"Keep the girls, Nora," he said then. His tone was casual, the way a man might tell a neighbor to keep the rusted hedge clippers he had borrowed two summers ago and forgotten to return. "There’s a son on the way."
I stopped folding my decree. The paper was stiff, twenty-pound bond with watermarked state seals that felt like tiny ridges under my thumb.
"What did you say?" I asked.
"You heard me," he said, finally looking me in the eye. There was no cruelty in his gaze, and that was the part that made my stomach drop toward the linoleum. There was simply an absence. It was the same look he gave the old lawnmower when the transmission began slipping in July—not hatred, just the mild inconvenience of having to push a piece of metal out to the curb for the scrap collectors. "The girls need their mother. They’re young. They’re girls. They need that emotional stuff that I’m not good at. Besides, Tessa’s house only has three bedrooms, and we need the guest room for when my mother comes down to help with the baby. It makes sense. You keep the girls, you take the child support the state calculated, and we don't have to do the back-and-forth every Wednesday night. I’ll see them on holidays. When it works out."
"When it works out," I repeated.
"Yeah. Like Thanksgiving. Or maybe the Sunday after Christmas. Let’s not make this difficult, Nora. You got what you wanted. You got the girls full-time without a custody trial. Most women would be thanking their lucky stars."
"Thank you, Grant," I said.
He blinked. A flicker of uncertainty crossed his forehead—the slight twitch of a salesman who had offered a discount expecting an argument, only to have the mark pay in cash without looking at the receipt.
"Right," he said, clearing his throat. "Well. My mom wanted to know if you were still bringing the green bean casserole to the family dinner in November. For the girls' sake. So things feel normal."
I looked down at the fourteenth tile. "Tell your mother I’ll consider it."
He nodded, already moving toward the heavy oak door that led to the corridor. "See you around, Nora. Don't forget the garage clicker."
The door clicked shut behind him. The brass latch took three seconds to seat into the jamb with a dull, hollow clack.
Deb didn't look up from her ledger. "Window six is down the stairs, take a left past the drinking fountain. If you’re not there by ten-thirty, the clerk goes on lunch."
"I don't need window six," I said.
I picked up my purse—a brown leather tote with a cracked handle that I had owned since the year Maddie had croup—and tucked the pink decree between Ellie’s spare inhaler and a bag of sour cherry drops from the pharmacy. My hands did not shake. My knuckles were pale, but they were steady.
When I reached the ground floor, the double doors of the county municipal building opened onto High Street. The morning was cool, smelling of damp sycamore leaves and diesel exhaust from the city buses idling along the curb. Across the intersection, Grant’s silver German sedan was already pulling out of the parking structure, its turn signal clicking with rapid, frantic precision as he cut across three lanes of traffic to head north toward the medical center.
I walked three blocks south to where my Corolla was parked beside an abandoned grain elevator. The car had 197,000 miles on the odometer, a dent in the passenger door where Grant had backed his riding mower into it three summers ago, and a heater that rattled like dried beans in an empty coffee can for the first ten minutes after you turned the key.
I sat in the driver's seat. I closed the door. I locked both sides with the manual levers on the armrests.
Then I reached under the passenger seat and pulled out the manila envelope I had hidden there on Thursday night, beneath the spare tire jack and a bundle of greasy rags.
Inside were three blue books with gold-embossed eagles on the covers. Mine. Ellie’s. Maddie’s.
Beside them were three printed itineraries from an airline with an office in Toronto. I had paid for them using the cash my grandmother had left me in an old cigar box under the floorboards of the cedar chest—nine thousand dollars in crisp fifty-dollar bills from nineteen-eighty-four that Grant had never known existed because he had never once offered to help me move that chest down the attic stairs.
Columbus to Toronto. Toronto to Reykjavik. Reykjavik to Dublin.
Departure time from Columbus: 6:15 PM.
I looked at the digital clock on the dashboard. It read 10:34 AM.
I had seven hours and forty-one minutes before the boarding doors closed.
I put the key into the ignition, turned it until the starter caught with its familiar, wheezing cough, and pulled out into the street. When I hit the third red light at the corner of Broad and Maple, the light turned green, but my foot stayed pressed against the brake pedal. My chest hitched once, twice, like an engine running out of fuel on a steep grade, and then I was crying so hard that the windshield dissolved into a smear of yellow streetlights and gray Ohio concrete.
I gripped the wheel until the plastic seams bit into the meat of my thumbs. I didn't cry for Grant. I didn't cry for the eleven years or the house on Elmwood or the yellow nursery that someone else’s child would soon sleep in.
I cried because when Ellie had asked me that morning why Daddy wasn't having breakfast with us, she had taken a piece of toast, torn it into four pieces, and laid one piece beside his empty coffee mug just in case he came through the back door before the school bus arrived.
"No more," I said aloud to the empty car. The rattle under the dashboard answered me with its steady, shivering chatter. "No more toast for an empty chair."
I pulled into the Sunoco station on the corner, wiped my face with a scratchy paper towel from the dispenser beside the air pump, and dialed my sister Erin’s number in County Kildare.
She answered on the fourth ring. Her voice was thick with the evening mist of a place six hours ahead of Ohio.
"Nora?"
"We’re coming," I said.
There was a pause on the other end, long enough for the Atlantic cable to hum with that strange, ocean-deep static that sounds like wind over wet gravel.
"The paper stars are up," Erin said softly. "The pink one is over the bed near the window, Nora. It catches the morning light from the sheep meadow. Tell Maddie the sheep have black faces and they don't care about trucks."
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"I’ll tell her," I said. "We’ll be at Dublin Airport by ten tomorrow morning."
"I’ll have the kettle on," Erin said. "Bring the girls home."
