Chloe started to stand. I touched her wrist, and she sat.
I slid the ring across the table. It made a small sound against the wood — one that felt louder than anything we had said.
“Drop your key in the mailbox by seven. Whatever you’ve left at my house will be on the porch. Diane has copies of everything you were angling for. If you contact me again, she goes to my attorney. The locks change tonight.”
“Maggie, come on.”
“You never wanted to marry me. You wanted to dismantle me. And you almost did.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it. He picked up the ring, looked at it as if calculating its resale value, and walked out without a word.
Chloe exhaled as though she had been holding her breath for an hour.
“Aunt Maggie, I am so sorry.”
“Don’t be. You just saved my life.”
That night, Chloe came home with me. We sat at my kitchen table — the same table where I had eaten so many dinners alone — and opened a bottle of wine that had been waiting two years for a reason.
“I thought I was lonely all these years,” I told her after a while.
She waited.
“Turns out I just hadn’t learned the difference between an empty house and a quiet one.”
