All Chapters of Divorce Suits Me Better: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

(Eric’s POV)I stared at her.“Right after we left the house—right after the divorce papers.” She pressed the heel of her hand against her cheekbone, catching a tear before it fell. “I wanted them to see this. I wanted them to come here and watch me walk into this room, and I wanted them to understand that I don’t need them anymore.”Her chin shook. She wiped her face again, harder, with both hands now, like she could scrub the whole evening off her skin.“God, I’m so stupid,” she whispered miserably. “I just—I just wanted them to see what I’d become.”“You are not stupid,” I said firmly.“I am.” She pulled her hands away from her face and stared at her wet palms. “I handed her the stage, Eric. She’s standing at our gate right now tearing me apart on live television, and I’m the one who sent her the invitation.”I did not tell her she was wrong. She was not wrong. But the girl standing in front of me with mascara on her knuckles had spent three years in a house where nobody got angry

(Sabrina’s POV)They drove me to the beach house the morning after the gala without telling me why.Eric’s way. When the world caught fire, Eric did not put it out. He moved you somewhere the fire couldn’t reach and let you sit until the smoke cleared on its own.The house was on the water. White clapboard, blue shutters, a porch that wrapped around three sides with hammocks strung between two posts at the far end.I lay in the hammock and watched the ocean and talked to whoever came close. Felix brought me a second coffee. Charlie asked if I wanted lunch. Adrian hovered near the screen door.Eric found me in the afternoon.He didn’t come up to the hammock. He sat down in the sand beneath it, cross-legged, and looked out at the water for a while. The wind was pulling at his collar and he didn’t fix it.“Sabrina.”“Yeah.”“Nate signed the divorce papers last night.”I stopped rocking.“Tyler received the filed copies this morning. It’s done. You are no longer his wife.”I stared at the

(Sabrina’s POV)I told my brothers I had an errand.Eric looked at me skeptically across the table.“What kind of errand?”“The personal kind,” I said lightly. “I need an hour. Maybe two. I’ll be fine.”Charlie opened his mouth. Adrian opened his mouth. Felix actually stood up.“Sit down,” I said, pointing at Felix. “All of you. I am a grown woman. I am going to a café. I will text you when I get there and I will text you when I leave. That is the deal.”Eric looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded once.“Take the driver,” he said.“Fine.”“And text Adrian when you arrive.”“I just said I would.”“And if anything feels wrong—”“Eric.”He raised both palms. I kissed his cheek on the way out and he pretended not to be worried about it, badly.The café was in a town I didn’t know, small and quiet, with wooden tables and a window seat that looked out on a street where nothing was happening.I arrived early, ordered tea, and sat down.My phone vibrated, and I picked it up instantly.

(Felix’s POV)Sabrina went still beside me and I knew before I turned my head.I didn’t need to see. I felt it in the way her arm locked against mine—every muscle going tight at once, her whole body bracing like a woman who’d just heard a sound in a dark house.I turned anyway.Alexis. Fifteen feet away, heels clicking across the lobby floor, phone in her left hand, handbag in her right, walking toward the lifts like she owned the building and was mildly annoyed that people were using it without permission.She hadn’t looked up. She was going to.I had about six seconds. I took one of them to look at my sister.Sabrina’s face had gone white. She was standing in the middle of a hospital lobby with the sound of her child’s heartbeat still ringing in her ears, and Alexis was about to walk straight into all of it.No.“Hide,” I said. I unhooked my arm from hers and I did not look back. “Stay low. Don’t move.”I was already walking.I cut across the atrium at an angle that put me between A

(Nate’s POV)My jaw locked.Of everything she could have said. Of every question in the world—where am I, what month is it, am I dying—the first word out of her mouth after weeks of silence was that name.“Grandma—”“Where is she, Nate? She was here. I remember. Right before I—she was in my room, she was shaking my shoulder, she was saying something about a fire—”“She is not here,” I said tightly.“Well, where is she? Call her. Tell her I’m awake. She’ll want to—”“She’s gone, Grandma.”The old woman went still.I sat up straighter. I had rehearsed this, in the car and in the shower and in the dark of my bedroom at three in the morning when I couldn’t sleep—I had built the sentences and I had lined them up and I had told myself that when the moment came, I would deliver them cleanly, and she would understand.“Sabrina set the fire,” I said.My grandmother’s eyes narrowed.“She lit a curtain in the bedroom. She was angry about the divorce, about Alexis, about the house.” I kept my voi