All Chapters of THE PRICE OF LETTING GO: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

It came through on a Thursday lunch break.I was sitting at my desk eating a sandwich Petra had brought back from the deli downstairs, one hand on my food and the other scrolling through reference images for the Hargrove lobby concept, when my phone buzzed. Then buzzed again. Then a third time in quick succession, which was the specific pattern that meant multiple people were sending me the same thing.I already knew it was not good news before I looked.The first message was from Camille. Just a link and a single word beneath it: “Selene.”The second was from a woman I had been friendly with during the marriage years, someone from Dominic’s social circle who I still heard from occasionally. She had sent the same link with: “I’m so sorry, I thought you should see this before someone else made it weird.”The third was from my mother, which meant it had traveled far enough that I was already behind.I put down my sandwich and clicked the link.It was a tabloid site, one of the mid-tier

I replied to Dominic’s text the next morning.Four words back, same as his four. “I’m fine. Thank you.” I sent it before I made my coffee, which meant I sent it before I was fully awake and therefore before the part of my brain that second-guesses everything came online. He did not reply immediately. I put my phone face-down and made the coffee and told myself I was glad he did not reply immediately.He replied forty minutes later with two words: “Good. Work hard.”I stood in my kitchen and read it twice and felt something that was almost like being seen, which was an uncomfortable thing to feel about a man I was supposed to be done with, and then I finished my coffee and got dressed and went to work.The Hargrove project was in the production phase now, which meant the big creative decisions had been made and the work had shifted into the detailed, exacting, deeply satisfying grind of actually building the thing. Petra was managing the asset library with the focused intensity of some

The appointment was at ten o’clock on a Wednesday morning.I wore the same thing I would have worn to any other meeting. Dark trousers, a white shirt, the good flats that did not hurt my feet. I had coffee at home first, standing at the kitchen counter, and I did not think too hard about what the morning was. I had learned by then that thinking too hard about things in advance was a way of spending emotional energy on a version of events that had not happened yet. Better to just show up and let it be what it was.My attorney Tobias met me in the lobby of her building at nine fifty. She was a small woman in her late fifties with very straight posture and the particular stillness of someone who had spent thirty years in rooms where composure was the only currency that mattered. She shook my hand, asked if I had eaten, and when I said yes she nodded like she was checking something off a list.“It will take less than twenty minutes,” she said. “Sign, witness, file. Then it’s done.”“Okay,

Everyone left at eight-fifteen.Petra first, coat already buttoned before she stood up. Ro with his headphones around his neck and half a conversation happening on his phone before he cleared the door. Dax last, one nod in my direction, nothing else required.Then it was just Nicolas and me and slide eleven.The deck had been strong all week. Seventeen slides that moved like a single argument, each one earning the next. But slide eleven stopped the momentum every time, and everyone felt it and nobody had fixed it because the problem was the kind you could not point at directly. Everything on the slide was correct. It just sat wrong.Nicolas stood at the screen with a container of cold noodles, fork in hand, staring at it.I sat on the edge of the communal table looking at the same slide.The building around us had gone quiet in the way buildings go quiet after eight, the hum of other people’s activity replaced by something more settled. The overhead lights on a timer had dimmed to hal

The lanyard had her old name on it.Selene Hartley. The registration had closed before the divorce finalized and nobody had caught it and now I was standing in the speaker holding area of a Midtown hotel with my old name hanging against the burgundy blazer and a cup of terrible coffee in both hands and four years of not doing this sitting in my throat like something I needed to swallow before I walked out there.I swallowed it.I had not presented my own work publicly in four years. I knew this the way you know a thing you have been not-thinking about deliberately, the not-thinking itself becoming a kind of weight. It was there when I accepted the conference invitation. There when I submitted the abstract. There every morning for the week before, sitting at the back of everything, not loud enough to stop me, just present enough to make the coffee taste slightly wrong.I reviewed my notes once in the holding area. Folded them. Put them in my bag.The two presenters before me were both