I press the button for the sixth floor of the elevator to my apartment and watch the numbers climb. My lips are still swollen from Finn's mouth, and I can taste him every time I swallow.
I am forty-seven minutes late.
Daniel's texts stopped arriving an hour ago, which means he has either passed out or he is waiting for me with his temper cracked open. The elevator doors open with a groan of protest, and I walk down the hallway toward our door with my keys already in my hand. My fingers are trembling.
I tell myself it is exhaustion, but my body knows the difference between tired and terrified, and right now it is preparing for impact.
When I unlock the door and step inside, the smell hits me first. Stale beer and salt and the sour musk of a body that has been sweating into the same cushions for hours. The television flickers in the corner, casting blue light across the living room.
A sports commentator's voice drones on at low volume, punctuated by the distant roar of a crowd that sounds like static. Daniel is sprawled across the couch with his mouth open, surrounded by a constellation of empty bottles and crumpled chip bags.
I stand in the doorway and look at the man I married.
His shirt is stained with something orange. His jaw is slack. One arm hangs off the edge of the cushion, fingers brushing the carpet where a bottle has tipped and leaked a dark puddle into the fibers.
‘I'm not asking because I have to. I'm asking because I'm not the kind of man who lets the woman carrying his child stand alone and scared.’
His voice from seven years ago moves through me, and I cannot reconcile it with the body in front of me.
Where is the man who held my hands and promised me I would never have to worry about anything?
Where is the man who said ‘scared and alone are two different things’?
I cross to the coffee table and begin gathering bottles, my movements automatic. Three empty Coronas. Two crushed Bud Lights. A whiskey glass with a finger of amber liquid still pooled at the bottom.
‘You don't have to worry about anything. I'll take care of you, both of you. That I can promise.’
The glass clinks against the bottles as I stack them in my arms. Daniel shifts on the couch, mumbles a curse, and settles back into unconsciousness. I watch his chest rise and fall and feel nothing but the hollow echo of promises made by a version of him that no longer exists.
How did I end up here?
The question arrives without fanfare. I carry the bottles to the kitchen and set them on the counter. Then return for the chip bags and the crumpled napkins and the pizza box that has been sitting on the floor for two days.
Where is the girl who was on her way to graduate with honors?
She is standing in an apartment that smells like decay, picking up after a man who has not looked at her with kindness in years. She is pregnant and bruised and thirty minutes removed from kissing someone else's fiancé in an office that costs more than her entire life.
‘My salary is enough for the entire family. A wife's place is at home, babe. I can provide for us just fine on my own.’
I dump the chip bags into the trash and the smell that rises makes my stomach lurch. Rancid and thick, it coats the back of my throat before I can cover my nose. When I look down and see the source.
A package of ground beef, gray and sweating, shoved into the garbage instead of the refrigerator. Daniel must have taken it out to cook and then forgotten about it. Or he got distracted by a game.
Or he simply did not care enough to finish what he started.
The meat has been sitting in the warmth for hours, maybe longer, and the stench is overwhelming. I tie off the bag with shaking hands and carry it to the larger trash bin, but the smell has already settled into my sinuses.
It mingles with the exhaustion and the nausea that has been my constant companion for eleven weeks. My body makes a decision my mind has no power to override.
I barely make it to the sink before I am vomiting.
The heaves are violent and uncontrollable, wrenching through me in waves that leave my eyes streaming and my throat raw. I grip the edge of the counter and let my body empty itself, gasping between spasms.
When it finally stops, I reach blindly for the paper towels mounted beside the refrigerator. My hand connects with a ceramic mug instead, and it crashes to the floor with a sound that seems to echo through the entire apartment.
From the living room, I hear Daniel curse.
I wipe my mouth with a trembling hand and rinse the sink, watching the water spiral down the drain in a pale, sickly swirl.
The scissors I had grabbed from the refrigerator magnet to cut down the cardboard boxes are still clutched in my other hand, and I set them on the counter before turning toward the doorway.
Daniel is awake.
I can hear him moving, the shuffle of his feet against the carpet, the particular rhythm of his breathing when he is working himself into a mood. I walk to the threshold between the kitchen and living room and stop.
He is not looking at me.
He is crouched beside the couch with my bag open in front of him, his hands rifling through the contents like he has done this many times before. Wallet. Keys. Lipstick. The folder from my interview.
And then his fingers close around a small rectangular box, and he goes still.
The pregnancy test. The second one I bought four days ago to confirm what the first one told me last week. I never opened it.
Daniel straightens slowly, the box clutched in his fist, and turns to face me.
His eyes are bloodshot, jaw is tight. The blue light from the television carves shadows across his face that make him look like a stranger, and I realize that he has been a stranger for years. I just did not want to see it.
"What the hell is this? Are you pregnant?" He holds up the box, shaking it like evidence. "Answer me right now, Aubrey. Are you fucking pregnant?"
I look at him, really look at him, for the first time in longer than I can remember.
The stained shirt. The slack posture. The empty bottles still scattered across the floor behind him. The apartment that smells like rot and neglect and every choice I made when I was twenty-two and terrified and convinced I did not deserve better.
I think about the girl I used to be.
I think about Finn's hands on my face.
I think about the way he said ‘you will never have to see him again.’
Daniel is still waiting for an answer. His face is twisting into the expression I know too well. The one that precedes the grabbing and the shoving and the fingerprints that take weeks to fade.
I do not answer his question. Instead, I hold his gaze and let the words I have been carrying for years finally leave my mouth.
"I want a divorce."