“Sign here,” Cole said, sliding a document across our marble dining table with the same casual precision he used for multi-million-dollar hedge fund deals. “I had my lawyer draw it up this morning.”
I stared at the paper titled Domestic Financial Restructuring Agreement while my coffee grew cold in my hands. Three days. I’d been unemployed for exactly three days, and my husband of eight years had already consulted a lawyer about dividing our life into itemized columns.
“From now on, we split everything 50/50,” he continued, uncapping his Montblanc pen—the one I’d given him for our fifth anniversary. “I’ll only care for myself.”
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Now, let’s see what Cole’s 50/50 arrangement really meant.
The morning light streaming through our penthouse windows caught the gold trim of the pen, the same light that used to make our Saturday mornings feel sacred. For eight years, this had been our ritual: me cooking eggs Benedict from scratch while Cole read the Financial Times, occasionally sharing merger news from his hedge fund world like it was pillow talk.
The Hollandaise sauce I’d perfected. The precise temperature of his coffee. The way I’d arrange fresh flowers on the table. All of it had felt like love.
Now it felt like unpaid labor he was itemizing.
“You had your lawyer draw this up,” I repeated slowly, flipping through pages of subsections and clauses, “without discussing it with me first?”
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