Too Late, I'm Done Crying

Isolde Laurent Pov

I never thought this day would come. Not once in five years did I let myself picture it, and yet here I was, standing in my kitchen with a pregnancy test in my hand.

Two lines. Dark and clear. I had already taken three that morning and one more after lunch, and the doctor's letter was folded in my handbag under a pack of tissues. Five years of nothing. Five years of his mother's eyes dropping to my flat stomach every time she visited. Five years of me smiling through it. And now I finally had what Saffron Cole wanted.

I cooked all his favorites. Braised beef, garlic rice, the soup his grandmother used to make. I put on the cream dress he said he liked in our first year, back when he still said things like that. I set the table twice because my hands shook so badly the first time that I knocked a glass over.

Then I stood in front of the hallway mirror and practiced.

"Saffron, I have something to tell you." I pressed my hand to my belly. "Good news, for once."

I looked happy in that mirror. I looked like a woman who had earned it.

The clock struck three. Then four. The soup went cold and I heated it again. Just after five I heard the gate, then the car pulling into the driveway, and my heart started pounding so hard I felt it in my ears. I smoothed my dress, wiped my palms on it, and went to the door with my smile already in place.

The door opened.

Saffron came in first, tie loose, jacket over his arm. And hanging on his side, her fingers locked in his, was a woman I knew right away. Everyone in the country would have.

Nyx Sinclair. The superstar. The face on every billboard and magazine and phone screen I had ever scrolled past. Long glossy waves, wine-red lips, a white dress that probably cost more than my whole wardrobe.

But it was Saffron's face that stopped me.

He was smiling. A real smile, wide and easy, almost boyish. I had never seen it. Not at our wedding, not on any anniversary, not on one single night of the five years I had waited up for him. I could actually feel how happy he was, standing there in my doorway, and none of it had ever been for me.

His hand was on her waist. Not resting there. Holding her, pulling her in close like he was scared someone would take her.

"Saffron?" My voice came out small. "Who is..."

He didn't answer. His eyes went over my face, my dress, the table behind me with the candles and the cold food, and there was nothing in them. No guilt. Not even surprise. He looked like a man waiting in line at a bank.

He took a white envelope from inside his jacket and pulled out a stapled stack of papers. He held them out.

"Sign it."

Two words. He said them the way he'd ask me to pass the salt. And they hit harder than anything anyone had ever said to me. My legs went weak. I looked down and the bold black letters at the top blurred together. Divorce Agreement.

The tears came before I could stop them. I wiped my face with my right hand, fast, like I could hide it. My left hand went to my stomach on its own.

He saw that. His eyes dropped right to it and moved on. He noticed nothing.

"Did you hear me?" he said. "Sign it."

I took the papers. They rattled in my fingers. He pulled a pen from his pocket and held it out, a plain black pen, and I stared at it like it was something dangerous.

"Is this how you're going to throw me away?" I asked.

My voice broke on the last word. I wanted him to flinch. I wanted a lie, an excuse, even an insult, anything. He just stood there with his jaw tight and said nothing.

Nyx laughed softly. She stepped up against him and kissed his cheek, then slid her arm around his neck and rested her shoulder against his chest. Her breast pressed into his arm and she made no effort to hide it. She wanted me to see.

Something in me snapped.

"Five years," I said. It scraped my throat on the way out. "Five years I gave up my future for you. Five years I was a loyal wife. I cooked, I waited, I swallowed every insult your family threw at me. I kept believing you would change." I laughed, and even I could hear how ugly it sounded. "You never did. I'm always the one who gets hurt, and you don't even care how I feel."

"That's enough," Saffron said.

"I haven't..."

"Stop acting like you're the only woman who ever got divorced." Nyx's voice was sweet, almost friendly. She looked me dead in the eye. "Besides, you don't deserve him."

It landed like a slap.

I turned to Saffron and waited. I waited for him to tell her to shut up. To say something, anything, in my defense, just once. He tightened his arm around her waist and looked at the floor.

That was my answer.

I thought about the doctor's letter in my bag. I thought about saying it out loud. I'm pregnant. It's yours. The words sat on my tongue.

Then I looked at Nyx's hand on his chest, at that pleased little curl of her mouth, and at the man who hadn't even wondered why I was crying. I swallowed every word.

If he didn't care enough to look at me, he didn't deserve to hear it.

I put the papers down on the table, right between the candles I'd lit for him. I pressed the pen to the page and my hand stopped shaking. Just like that. I don't know why. Maybe that's what it feels like when the last thread finally gives.

Isolde Laurent. I signed it slowly, every letter.

I dropped the pen on top. "There."

Saffron blinked. Once. Something crossed his face, something I couldn't read, and then it was gone. He picked up the papers like a man collecting on a bet.

I grabbed my handbag, the one with the doctor's letter in it, and walked to the door. Nobody stopped me. Nobody said my name. Behind me Nyx laughed again, light and careless, and I heard it all the way down the hall.

At the door I turned around.

"I promise you, Saffron Cole," I said. My voice was quiet, but it didn't shake. "You will regret this."

He smiled at me. Small, cold, like I'd told a bad joke. Then he turned back to his superstar.

I walked out.

The sun hit me like an oven. Heat came up off the pavement in waves, hot enough to fry a person alive, and my dress was stuck to my back before I reached the gate. No car. No suitcase. No plan. Just one hand free to hold the only thing I had left.

I pressed it to my stomach and kept walking.

He had thrown away his wife. What he didn't know was that he'd thrown away his child too, and I swore under that burning sky he would never find out until it was too late to beg.

Isolde's POV

I didn't stop walking until the sun finally let go of me.

The first big building I reached was a bank with glass doors. I slipped inside and stood by the entrance, where the air conditioner blew cold across my wet neck. The guard gave me a long look, the kind people give a woman crying in public, then politely looked away. My dress was stuck to my back. My feet burned. I hadn't even noticed I was still wearing the flat sandals I cooked in.

I leaned against the wall, pulled my phone from my handbag, and held my thumb over one name for a long time before I pressed it.

It rang twice.

"Hello, my baby."

"Hello, Grandma." My throat tightened just from saying it.

"Have you told him?"

That was the first thing she asked. Not how are you, not where are you. She had been waiting on this since morning, since I called her from the clinic and whispered the news like it might break if I said it too loud.

"No," I said. "We're already divorced."

The line went quiet. Behind her I could hear a spoon tapping against a pot.

"What did you say?"

"He brought the papers. I signed them."

"What happened? Isolde, what did he do?"

"Grandma, please. This is not the time for that. I'm tired."

I braced myself for the lecture. Go back and tell him about the baby. Think of the child. Think of what people will say. Any other relative would have started before I finished talking.

"Okay," she said.

Just that. Soft and steady, like a blanket settling over my shoulders.

I pressed my fist to my mouth so the guard wouldn't hear me. She never argued with me. I lost my parents when I was seven, and she took my hand at the graveside and never really let go. She became my mother, my father, my best friend, the only person who ever got the real me. Whatever I chose, she stood behind it, even when it was foolish.

"Where are you?"

"Downtown. At a bank."

"Come home, right now. I'll warm the food. And take a cab, don't walk in this sun."

"Yes, Grandma."

I hung up and stood there with the phone against my chest until my breathing slowed.

Outside, a yellow cab stopped the moment I raised my hand. The driver was an older man with a toothpick in his mouth and a little cross swinging from his mirror. I gave him the address on Marlowe Street and he pulled into traffic without a word. I was grateful for that. I checked my phone. No missed calls. Not one message. Some stupid part of me had still expected something, anything. I turned the screen face down on my lap and watched the city slide past, the office towers, the street vendors, couples holding hands at the crossing, and wondered how everything could look so normal.

At the second red light his eyes found mine in the mirror.

"Long day, miss?"

"You could say that."

"Mine too." He moved the toothpick to the other side. "Whatever it is, it looks smaller in the morning. Thirty years of driving, that's the only thing I've learned."

"I hope you're right."

"I'm usually right about two things. Traffic and heartbreak." He winced. "Sorry. None of my business."

"It's okay."

When we reached Marlowe Street my chest ached. The little house at the end of the road looked the way it always did, the gate paint peeling, Grandma's tomato plants lined up in old paint buckets, one bulb flickering over the door. I paid the driver.

"Take care of yourself," he said, and drove off.

I hadn't even touched the gate when the front door opened.

Grandma stood there in her faded blue house dress, gray hair tied in a scarf, glasses sliding down her nose. She looked smaller than I remembered, or maybe I had forgotten what it felt like to be looked at by someone who loved me.

"Come here," she said, and opened her arms.

I walked into them. She smelled like soap and pepper and every Sunday of my childhood.

"Don't cry, baby. Everything will be fine."

"Yes, Grandma," I said.

I swear I meant to stay calm. I told myself I had cried enough in that hallway, on that walk, in that cab. But the second her hand pressed the back of my head, something gave way. I didn't even notice when the tears started. They soaked into her shoulder and then I was sobbing so hard my whole body shook.

"Shh. I've got you."

"Five years," I choked. "I wasted five years."

"You wasted nothing. Come inside."

She walked me through the sitting room with one arm around my waist, as if I might fall. Same sofa with the crocheted cover. Same television with the cracked corner. Same photograph of my parents smiling on a beach I never got to see with them. The house smelled of onions and pepper, and it smelled like being safe, and I almost cried again.

My old room was waiting. Bed made, window open, a small pot of basil on the sill that hadn't been there before.

"I dusted this room every Sunday," she said, when she saw me looking. "Don't ask me why. I just never believed you'd stay gone."

I sat on the edge of the mattress. She sat beside me and took my hands between hers. Her skin was thin and dry, her knuckles swollen.

"I won't ask what he did," she said. "Not tonight. When you're ready, you'll tell me."

"Thank you."

"But tell me one thing. Did he put his hands on you?"

"No. Nothing like that." I wiped my face with my wrist. "He didn't have to."

She nodded slowly, like that was somehow worse. Maybe it was.

I looked down at my stomach, then back at her.

"He doesn't know about the baby, Grandma. And he never will."

She studied me for a long moment. I knew that look. She gave it to me before every big decision I ever made, the one that asked are you sure, and then waited.

"Isolde."

"I promise you," I said. My voice was hoarse, but I meant every word. "He will never know about this child."

"Okay," she said, and squeezed my hands. "Then it's ours."

Ours. That one word nearly broke me again.

Her palm settled on my stomach, so light it barely touched. "How far along?"

"Seven weeks. The doctor said everything looks fine."

"Seven weeks," she whispered, and her eyes went wet. "A small one. Strong already, like you."

Then she cleared her throat and stood up with a little grunt. "Wash your face. Change out of that dress. I'll bring you something to eat."

"I'm not hungry."

"You're eating for two now. I didn't ask if you were hungry."

Despite everything, I laughed, a wet, cracked little laugh, but real.

When she left, I peeled off the cream dress I'd put on that morning with so much hope and dropped it on the floor. I pulled on an old T-shirt from the wardrobe, soft from a hundred washes, and sat on the bed until I heard plates clatter.

She came back with a tray. Rice and stew, a boiled egg, a glass of water, and half a ripe plantain I knew she'd been saving for herself.

"Grandma, this is yours."

"It's yours now. Eat before it gets cold. And don't blame the cook if the stew is salty. I was thinking about you while I seasoned it."

She sat in the chair by the window, hands folded, watching me the way she had when I was little and refused my vegetables. I took one bite, then another. I hadn't realized how empty I was. Halfway through I was crying again, quietly, tears dropping into the stew, and she pretended not to see.

When I finished she took the tray, kissed my forehead, switched off the main light, and left the little lamp burning.

"Sleep, my baby. Tomorrow is another day."

"Goodnight, Grandma."

The door closed softly.

I lay down and pulled the thin blanket to my chin. The ceiling fan creaked. Somewhere down the street a dog barked, a motorbike whined past, and then it was quiet. Too quiet. I put my hand on my stomach and waited to feel something, but there was nothing yet, only my own heartbeat and the weight of everything I didn't know how to carry.

Somewhere across the city, he was probably laughing with her.

I thought about the house I'd left. The suitcase I didn't have. The money I didn't have either. No job, no savings of my own, and a baby on the way.

And then I thought about Grandma's hands. The swollen knuckles. The plantain she gave up without a word. The cracked television she never replaced, the leaking tap she kept promising to fix next month. She was already stretching her pension so thin you could see through it.

I couldn't sleep that night. I lay there in the dim light with tears running into my ears, still crying, and the same thought kept circling until it was all I could hear. I had come home with nothing, and now I was going to add another expense to my grandmother, who was already struggling.

Saffron's POV

The boardroom on the twentieth floor always smelled like coffee and old money. That morning it smelled like a trap.

I sat at the head of the long glass table with my mother on my right, her back straight, her pearls in place, both hands folded over her leather folder like a judge about to read a sentence. Six members of management filled the other chairs. Nobody was looking at the quarterly figures. They were all looking at me.

"The numbers are fine," old Mr. Hargrove said, clearing his throat. "That is not what we came to discuss."

"Then what did we come to discuss?" I asked, though I already knew.

"You need an heir, Saffron." My mother did not even lower her voice. "The board needs someone to stand behind this name when you are gone. A second you."

I looked at her. I knew exactly what she was really asking. She had been asking for five years, in every way a mother can, at dinners, at weddings, in the car, over the phone at midnight. Divorce her. Find someone who can give you a child. Find someone worthy of the family.

What none of them knew was that I loved my wife.

I loved her in a way that scared me. I loved how she hummed while she cooked, how she left little notes in my coat pockets, how she waited up on the nights I came home late and pretended she had only just woken. But I had learned early that love shown in front of my mother became a target. When I held Isolde's hand at a family dinner, my mother found something wrong with her cooking for months. When I praised her, the insults doubled. So I went cold. I stopped looking at her across the table. I stopped answering her notes. I told myself it was a favor, that a wife ignored was safer than a wife loved, and that someday I would find a way to fix it.

Five years later, the fix had never come.

"Sir." My secretary, Camille, leaned forward from her chair along the wall. "With respect, it is not only about an heir. The company needs visibility. A wife who is famous, someone the public already adores, would put your name in front of millions overnight. Think of the endorsements. Think of the press."

Her voice cut through what I was thinking, and I realized I had stopped hearing the room.

"The meeting has ended," I said.

My mother turned. "What did you just say?"

"The meeting has ended."

I stood. My chair scraped back so hard it hit the wall. Nobody spoke as I walked out, and nobody followed.

In the elevator I watched the numbers drop and felt every one of them in my chest. Everything irritated me. The soft music. The polished brass. My own reflection in the mirrored wall, jaw tight, eyes tired, the face of a man who had already decided something he did not want to do.

That morning Isolde had been in the kitchen when I left. She was humming. She asked if I would be home for dinner, and I said I did not know, and she said she would cook anyway. I walked out without eating. I remember her standing there with the spoon in her hand.

The doors opened on the ground floor.

My lawyer, Mr. Dunmore, was waiting by the front desk with a slim black folder under his arm. He was a quiet man, careful with his words, and he had not once asked me why.

"Is it complete?" I asked, taking the folder from him.

"Every page, sir, as you instructed. Her settlement is in the second section."

I flipped through it without reading. My fingers felt thick. I had made sure the terms were generous. More than generous. Whatever happened after today, she would not go without.

"Thank you."

I turned and there was a white Tesla at the curb, the newest model, as if the dealer had delivered it that morning. The door lifted, and Nyx Sinclair stepped out in a white dress and dark glasses, hair falling over one shoulder. A few people on the sidewalk had already stopped to stare. She smiled the way she did for cameras.

"You look beautiful," I said.

"Thank you." She slid her glasses up. "Is it done?"

"Almost. Let's go."

She took my arm. It felt like carrying someone else's coat.

I had never really wanted her. That is the truth. We met at a charity gala in spring and she walked up to me before the first course was served and asked me to dinner, as if she were asking the time. I said yes because Camille had said the exposure would help. Since then she tagged me in everything. Her videos, her stories, her mirror photos in the back of my car. Her followers started calling us a couple before we had even decided what we were. I let it happen. I told myself it was business.

In the car she scrolled through her phone, laughing at comments. I stared out the window. I watched the city thin into the long road that led home, to the house with the white gate and the garden Isolde watered herself because she did not trust the gardener.

"You're quiet," Nyx said.

"I'm thinking."

"About her?"

I did not answer. She slipped her hand into mine and I made myself smile. I practiced it, honestly. I held it in the side mirror's reflection until it looked natural. Wide, easy, happy. The kind of smile that would make a wife believe there was no hope left.

I was good at it. That was the worst part.

The gate opened. The car rolled up the driveway and I smelled something before the engine even cut off. Garlic, and beef, and something sweet underneath.

The door opened before I reached it.

She stood there in a cream dress I remembered from our first year. Her hair was pinned up and her eyes were bright, and there was a smile on her face that was meant for someone who had come home to her. Behind her, the table was set. Candles. Two plates. Two glasses.

She had cooked for me.

For one terrible second my feet stopped working. I wanted to walk past Nyx, past the folder, past everything, and put my arms around her. I wanted to ask what she had been about to tell me.

Instead my hand tightened on Nyx's waist, and I pulled her closer.

I saw it land. I saw her smile falter and break apart, piece by piece, as she looked at my face and at the woman beside me. I had rehearsed that moment in the car, and still I wasn't ready for how much it would hurt to watch.

I took the papers out of the envelope and held them out.

"Sign it."

She cried. She wiped her face with her right hand and dropped her left to her stomach, a small, quiet motion, like a woman steadying herself against a wave. I told myself it was grief. I looked at the pen instead of her.

She asked if this was how I was going to throw her away.

I said nothing, because if I opened my mouth I would have said the truth. Nyx kissed my cheek and curled her arm around my neck, and Isolde saw it all. I felt each second pass like a nail being pushed in.

Then Nyx told her she did not deserve me, and I stood there and let her.

She signed. Her handwriting was slow and clear, every letter in place, the same handwriting I used to find on little notes in my coat. She dropped the pen, picked up her bag, and walked toward the door without looking back.

"I promise you, Saffron Cole. You will regret this."

I smiled at her, cold and small, the way my mother smiles at waiters. It was the only face I had left that would not shake.

Then she was gone. The door stayed open, letting in a long bar of white sun and the sound of her footsteps fading down the drive.

I stood in the hallway holding the signed papers, the candles still burning on the table behind me.

Nyx stepped in front of me and ran her finger along my tie, her head tilted, her eyes searching my face the way people search a mirror.

"Thank God she has finally left you," she said softly.

I pretended to smile. But inside me, I didn't want her gone.