I asked him why. Over and over. I followed him around the house while he packed.

“You never said anything,” I said. “Not once. You never said you weren’t happy. I asked you, Gary. At Christmas. I asked you if everything was okay, and you said it was fine. You said everything was fine.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” he said.

“So you’re hurting me now instead?”

He zipped up the suitcase.

“I’ll send someone for the rest of my stuff,” he said.

Then he walked out to his Buick and drove away.

He left his keys on the kitchen counter. I heard them hit the granite.

I sat down on the kitchen floor and didn’t get up for a long time.

The first few weeks were terrible.

I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat much. I called in sick to work three days in a row, which I’d never done in eleven years. Kevin flew home from Denver for a long weekend and slept on the couch and made me grilled cheese sandwiches and watched old movies with me.

“Dad called me,” Kevin said on the second night. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the couch. “He said you guys had been unhappy for a long time.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “I wasn’t unhappy. I didn’t know he was.”

Kevin was quiet for a while.

“I believe you, Mom,” he said.

Linda was the one who got me through it.

Linda lives across the street. She’s sixty-two, a retired nurse, divorced herself twelve years ago. She has short silver hair and a laugh you can hear from two houses away. She grows the best roses on Maple Court and has an opinion about everything.

She came over the second day after Gary left. She didn’t knock. She just walked in with a casserole dish of baked ziti and a bottle of wine and put them both on my counter.

“Eat this,” she said. “Then cry. Then eat more.”

She came over every day for two weeks. She made me get dressed. She made me take walks around the block. She sat with me on the porch at night and let me talk about Gary until I was sick of my own voice.

One night, about three weeks in, we were sitting on my porch swing, and I said, “What if he comes back?”

Linda looked at me.

“Do you want him to?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Part of me does. Part of me thinks I’d take him back in a second if he showed up on that porch and said he was sorry.”

Linda was quiet for a long time.

“Well,” she said finally, “if he ever comes back, and you decide you don’t want him, you call me. I’ll come stand right next to you while he gets his things. I’ll stand by my rosebush with my arms crossed and glare at him. I’m very good at glaring.”

I laughed for the first time in three weeks.

“Deal,” I said.

Then, slowly, things got better.

Not all at once. A little at a time.

In August, I signed up for a night class at the community college. Introduction to Accounting. I’d always been good with numbers. Gary used to tease me about it, about how I balanced the checkbook to the penny. He called it “Debbie’s little hobby.” I’d always wanted to go back to school. Gary always said we didn’t have the money.

Turns out we did. Gary just had other plans for it.

I loved that class. I loved sitting in a classroom with a notebook and a pencil, learning something new. Something that had nothing to do with Gary. Something that was just mine.

In September, I met with a divorce attorney. Her name was Patricia Moore. She was in her fifties, calm and sharp and very kind. We started the paperwork.

Gary wanted out fast. He wanted a “clean break,” he said. He didn’t want to fight. He didn’t want the house. He said he wanted to start over in an apartment downtown with his girlfriend. So Patricia worked out a buyout. I’d pay Gary for his half of the house, from my retirement savings and a small loan. He’d sign it over to me.

He signed the papers in October without reading most of them. He just wanted the check.

The house transfer was finalized at the end of that month. The divorce itself would take longer. In our state, there’s a waiting period. So we were still technically married. But the house was mine. Only mine. My name on the deed.

In November, I painted the kitchen.

Gary had always hated color. For twenty-two years, our kitchen was beige. Beige walls, beige cabinets, beige countertops. He said colors were “tacky.”

I went to the hardware store on a Saturday morning and stood in the paint aisle for an hour. Then I picked a deep, beautiful blue called Harbor Night.

I painted the cabinets myself. It took me all weekend. Linda came over Sunday afternoon to help with the trim, and we drank wine and played old Motown records and sang “My Girl” at the top of our lungs.

When I was done, I stood in the doorway and looked at it.

My kitchen. Blue.

I loved it.

That same week, I had the locks changed.

All of them. The front door, the back door, the side door to the garage. A nice young man named Tony came out and did it in an hour.

When he handed me the new keys, I held them in my hand for a long time.

Nobody else in the world had a copy.

So by the time Gary showed up in my driveway four months later with his suitcases and his golf clubs, I wasn’t the woman he’d left in June.

I just didn’t think he knew that yet.