Carol Ashworth nodded like she'd heard that a thousand times.
I told Petra on a Thursday evening. We were in the kitchen, both of us, between the end of the workday and dinner, and I said, "Sit down. I need to tell you something."
She sat down. She must have read something in my face because she went immediately still.
"I called Ford Gallagher last Sunday night," I said. "I took the Singapore position. I accepted the offer."
She stared at me.
I've also spoken with an attorney, I said. You'll be served with papers this week. I didn't want that to be the first you heard of any of it.
Eli. Her voice was barely audible. You told me if I couldn't handle your arrangement with Damon, maybe we weren't right for each other. I've thought about that a lot this week. I think you were right.
I didn't mean it like that.
I understand, but I've been thinking about it and I think it was more honest than you intended it to be.
You're leaving the country? she said. You're just... you're leaving.
I start in 6 weeks.
She stood up, sat back down. Her hands were flat on the table the way people put their hands when they're trying to stabilize something.
Eli, I love you.
I looked at her. I know you do. I don't think love has been our problem.
Then what is the problem?
We want different things, I said. You told me that yourself last Sunday morning.
I was frustrated. People say true things when they're frustrated. That's kind of the point of frustration.
She started crying. And I want to be honest about what I felt in that moment because it would be easy to say I felt nothing or I felt vindicated or I felt like I'd won something. None of those were true.
What I felt was sad. Deeply, specifically sad. The kind of sad that comes from watching something that could have been good reveal itself as something that wasn't going to survive.
I didn't comfort her. I didn't know how to do that honestly without making promises I wasn't going to keep.
I made dinner because we both needed to eat. We sat at the table and barely spoke.
Afterward, I went upstairs to the bedroom and she stayed on the couch. I don't know how late she sat there.
The weeks that followed were the logistical deconstruction of 6 years, the townhouse in East Lake.
We'd need to decide what to do with it. We'd bought it together, and the equity belonged to both of us.
Petra could buy out my share, or we could sell. She said she'd think about it.
I started sorting through my things with the calm, deliberate focus that had always served me well at work. Books I was taking, books I was leaving, art that was hers, art that was mine, art we'd bought together and had to negotiate.
My friend Todd came over one weekend and helped me pack boxes into a storage unit I'd rented near South Lake Union.
We worked mostly in silence, the way you do with a friend who understands you well enough not to fill the air with noise.
"You don't have any regrets?" he said at one point.
I thought about it genuinely. About leaving? No. About the marriage being what it was? Yeah, of course.
You think she ever crossed a line with him?
I honestly don't know, I said. At some point, I stopped being sure and at some other point I stopped being sure it was the most important question.
Todd nodded. What's the most important question?
Whether I was willing to spend the next 30 years feeling the way I've felt for the last year. And the answer to that was pretty clear.
Petra had a conversation with her sister Vera, who lived in Bellevue. Vera reached out to me.
I've always liked Vera. She's direct the way Petra sometimes wasn't, and she asked if we could talk.
We met for coffee at a place near the Eastside Rail Station.
She's devastated, Vera said. I believe that. She doesn't understand how you went from zero to Singapore in one week.
It wasn't one week, I said. It was a year of one week at a time.
Vera looked at her coffee. She says, "You never really told her how bad it was."
I told her, I said. In November, in February, in March. The words came out of my mouth in the kitchen of our house and she pivoted every single time to telling me I was being unreasonable.
Vera didn't argue with that. She just sat with it for a moment.
"What do you want her to understand?" she asked.
"I want her to understand that the ultimatum she gave me last Sunday was the most honest communication we'd had in months. She said it as a threat, but it was actually a clarity. She was telling me what her priorities were. I just finally believed her."
Vera drove home to Bellevue and I drove back to what was increasingly becoming just an apartment I used to live in.
6 days before my flight, Petra came to me with a conversation I hadn't expected.
She'd been staying at her sister's some nights, at the townhouse other nights. We'd been navigating the same space with the careful choreography of two people trying not to cause any more damage than had already been done.
She sat down across from me at the kitchen table and said, "I ended things with Damon."
I looked at her.