Graham gave my front-row seat to his mistress while she sat there with my novel on her lap

The visiting room at the Metropolitan Correctional Center smelled of industrial bleach, floor wax, and despair.

I sat on one side of the heavy acrylic partition, my hands folded over a slim leather folder. Across from me, Graham sat in a bright orange jumpsuit that made his sallow, sagging skin look almost grey.

His silver hair was gone, buzzed down to an uneven grey stubble by a prison barber. He had lost twenty pounds in three weeks; his cheekbones were hollow, his eyes dull, sunken into his skull like two burnt-out coals.

He didn't sneer today. He didn't pound the table. He barely had the strength to hold the telephone receiver to his ear.

I picked up my receiver.

"Hello, Graham," I said.

He looked at me through the smudged, scratched plastic. He took a long, rattling breath that sounded like dry leaves scraping over concrete.

"Are you happy now?" he whispered through the earpiece.

"Happiness isn't the absence of you, Graham," I replied evenly. "It's the presence of myself. But I am peaceful."

Graham looked down at his cuffed wrists resting on the steel counter.

"The plea agreement," he muttered. "The prosecutor said if you sign the civil indemnity waiver, they’ll recommend seven years instead of fifteen. Is that why you’re here? To watch me beg for the seven?"

I opened the leather folder and pressed the document against the acrylic glass so he could read the bold, black print at the top:

*FINAL DECREE OF DISSOLUTION OF MARRIAGE.*

*CASE NO. 2024-DR-0914.*

*EVELYN PIERCE, PETITIONER, v. GRAHAM ALDER, RESPONDENT.*

"The civil indemnity is already attached, Graham," I said. "Julian signed off on the plea recommendation this morning. You will serve seven years at Otisville. You will forfeit your personal pension, your country club bonds, and your share of the Long Island property. Vale Holdings has been liquidated to pay the restitution fund for the junior employees whose pensions you stole."

Graham closed his eyes. A single, silent tear carved a clean path through the grime on his hollow cheek.

"Seven years," he breathed. "I'll be sixty-three when I get out. I'll have nothing. No home. No friends. No name."

"You will have what you brought into this marriage, Graham," I said softly. "Nothing."

He looked up at me, his eyes searching my face with a pathetic, desperate confusion that had haunted him since the night of the gala.

"Why, Evie?" he asked, his voice breaking into a ragged sob. "Why didn't you just tell me? Why didn't you just tell me you were Aurelia Wren? We could have been the most powerful couple in the country! We could have had everything!"

I looked at him through the plastic.

Even now, sitting in an orange jumpsuit behind federal glass, he truly did not understand. He genuinely believed that the tragedy of our lives was a failure of marketing. He thought that if I had only handed him my soul on a silver platter, he would have loved me for it.

"Because, Graham," I said, my voice steady, clear, and final as a closing bell, "if I had told you, you would have taken the pen out of my hand and signed your name to the title page. You would have turned my art into your product. You would have made me feel like an employee in my own soul."

I slid the pen under the small slot at the base of the partition, followed by the signature page.

"Sign the papers, Graham," I said. "And let me go home."

He looked at the pen. His fingers, calloused and dirty from three weeks in detention, trembled as he picked it up.

He didn't read the terms. He didn't call for his public defender.

With a slow, shaking hand, Graham Alder scratched his signature across the bottom of the decree, surrendering every claim, every title, every memory, and every right to the name Pierce.

He pushed the paper back through the slot.

I took the document. I checked the signature. It was complete.

I stood up, sliding the paper into my leather folder, and smoothed the front of my dark wool coat.

Graham watched me, his face collapsing into pure, unadulterated panic as he realized that once I walked through that heavy steel door, he would never see me again.

"Evie!" he called out, tapping his cuffed hands against the plastic. "Evie, wait! What are you going to do with Alder Manor? What are you going to do with my house?"

I paused at the door. I looked back at him, one hand resting on the heavy brass push-bar.

"It was never Alder Manor, Graham," I said softly. "The new sign went up yesterday morning. *The Wren Sanctuary for Women Writers*. Martha is the director. Our first six fellows arrive in January."

Graham’s mouth fell open, a silent scream of agony dying in his throat as the heavy steel door clicked open.