Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 109843 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 549(@200wpm)___ 439(@250wpm)___ 366(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 109843 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 549(@200wpm)___ 439(@250wpm)___ 366(@300wpm)
twenty-two
Green Card
I was happy when I got the mail.
Not a foreign emotion for me. I was a generally happy person. Before this fucking rollercoaster.
I’d promised myself not to let Emmet have power over me and make me some kind of scarred, quiet woman paralyzed by fear. In fact, I’d kind of gone the other way. I’d lived a wild life since I arrived in the US. Diving into new places and new men with abandon. But I’d always kept men at arm’s length because of him. The fear he’d created in me.
It wasn’t Emmet now creating that fear. It was my now-bulging stomach. It was the human-looking sonogram picture on our fridge. It was our perfect nursery. It was Kip talking to my stomach every night. Our little girl had a whole lot of power. To create, to give me everything or take it all away.
It was a lot to handle.
Too much, at first.
But now, I’d let myself sink into it.
And Kip was, yes, maybe a small part of why I was damn near skipping to the letterbox that morning.
I was hoping it contained a package of Australian treats that my one remaining Australian friend had sent me. He was the only person I kept in touch with who I grew up with. He’d grown up in similar circumstances than me. Worse, really. With a drunk dad who also happened to be homophobic, so he beat the shit out of his son when it became clear he was gay.
Andrew never hid that he was gay, not even when his dad beat him up or the assholes at school gave him shit—a bunch of whom then secretly hooked up with him. He’d worked his way up at a PR company, basically ran the fucking place now, and was married.
We talked sporadically, and he was the only person who knew me from my childhood. Who knew my whole story.
And he still sent me care packages even though we hadn’t seen each other in years because I was too much of a coward to be reminded of my past.
It was not a care package.
Instead, it was an official-looking letter with a US government stamp on it.
My hand shook when I opened it, already knowing what it contained.
An approval.
A Green Card.
There it was. The thing I needed. The thing that had started this whole marriage and subsequent pregnancy.
The thing that gave me security—for a few years, at least. But our lawyer had assured me that no matter what our marital status was in a few years, me having a child and a business and a home in my name should all be points toward me maintaining my status.
Kip didn’t know I’d had that meeting. He didn’t need to know.
But this. This he needed to know.
Because this was the end of our marriage.
It was tempting, really fucking tempting, to shove the letter and the Green Card in the junk drawer and pretend I never got it. But that wasn’t really a good long-term plan. Avoiding problems only made them bigger.
Better to rip the Band-Aid off and all that.
Though I did drag my feet walking from the letterbox back inside. And I already moved pretty slow these days.
Kip called my walk a ‘waddle’ once and once only.
Though he was nowhere near stupid enough nor brave enough to utter the word again, it was becoming very clear that I was indeed waddling instead of walking these days. And I still had over a month left.
Not that I was complaining. Every new ailment, every foot in my ribs or my bladder, was just another reminder that this was happening.
The baby was happening, at least.
It remained to be seen what was going to happen with Kip and me.
“I know you’ve been all about sugar these days,” Kip called as I walked in the door, “but I figured Nora had that covered. And I also remembered that I hadn’t made these in a while.”
I got into the kitchen just as he was taking the tray out of the oven. The whole place smelled of beef and pastry, and despite the swirl in my stomach, my mouth watered. It seemed nothing could quell my hunger these days, not even the impending breakdown of my marriage.
Could a marriage really break down if it was never real in the first place?
“Here it is.” I tapped the envelope, wishing I could delay relaying this information and enjoy a pie first. “Your ticket out of this marriage and this situation.”
Kip frowned downward, wiping his hands on a kitchen towel before reading the letter. He froze pretty quickly, not saying anything.
My heart dropped.
Why had I hoped for anything different?
“It’s done,” I said, forcing my voice to sound even. “Of course, it’ll look really shady if we file straight away, so we’ll have to separate for a while, spin some bullshit about space and working on things or conscious uncoupling or whatever the fuck the kids are calling it these days.”