February 2010 | Five Months before the Accident

“You must have made up your mind,” Kenny spat at me, his boyish good looks lost in an angry scowl.

He had thrown open the door and stomped into the bedroom where I stood in the adjoining bathroom’s doorway, staring into the mirror, concentrating on tweezing my eyebrows. Jerrica, Natalie, and Connor were just outside, watching TV in the living room.

“What are you talking about?” I asked in a low voice.

The last few weeks had been tense. He knew I wasn’t happy, and I knew I had to do something about it. I turned away from the mirror, took a few steps, and shut the door behind him so the kids didn’t hear.

“You’ve been calling divorce lawyers,” he said, throwing down a phone bill he’d printed at work, detailing calls made from my cell. “So then yeah, you must have made up your mind!”

Ah, the divorce lawyers. I had called only a couple—and within the past two days—trying to find out what the timeline and cost might be. Really, I was just gathering information. I wanted to know what I would be getting into if I decided to proceed.

After eighteen years of marriage, lately we spent more time apart than together. Affection had turned to antagonism, and I had become cynical, angry, sad, and looking for something Kenny wasn’t giving. I was miserable, and I couldn’t imagine he was any happier.

“Well?” he asked. “Aimee?”

This was the moment. The inevitable, monumental moment that I knew had probably been coming. I either told him now, or I continued to live this lie. I breathed in through my nose and held it, steeling myself.

“Okay then, Kenny. I want a divorce.”

Breathe out.

“Well, that’s just fuckin’ great,” he growled.

The words slid out of his mouth and into his T-shirt as he bent over, sitting down on the edge of the bed. He held his head in his hands while I just stood there, allowing what had just come spilling out to sink in.

He pulled his wedding ring from its finger. The triceps of his upper arm clenched tight under the cut-off sleeve of his shirt as he gripped the ring, and then he threw it. Hard. The gold band, no longer a precious metal, bounced off the wall. Clink. I flinched.

“Don’t you love me anymore?”

Tears rolled down his round cheeks, but I might as well have been that wall.

“Yes, I love you,” I said in a quiet voice. “But not the way that I should for a marriage to work.”

I watched him consider this. Resignation.

He didn’t argue. He knew, too. Maybe he even felt the same way.

“You’re telling the fucking kids,” he snarled. “If this is what you want, then you”—he pointed a finger at me—“will tell them.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. He was pinning the end of a twenty-year relationship on me, rather than seeing it as something we were both a part of. It proved what I had felt for a long time: Our marriage was no partnership. And in that moment, I knew he wouldn’t fight for me. I wasn’t sure it would matter if he did.

Defeated, Kenny walked out of the room. I knew he would retreat to the basement where he spent most of his off-work time, escaping to a virtual world where grown men played war games chasing after and shooting each other. I went into the kitchen to busy myself with mindless tasks and wrap my mind around the last half-hour.

There was no relief and no weight lifted. And I had no idea how I should be feeling.

What would happen now?

After a while, he came upstairs, stomped into our bedroom, and shut the door. He was grieving; I was reeling.

I knew the marriage was officially broken.

An hour or so later, I heard the bedroom door’s familiar squeak. All three kids and I were sprawled in different positions and places on the living room’s new brown furniture, still watching TV. Their father burst into the room.

“Your mother has something she wants to tell you,” Kenny said through gritted teeth.

Oh no. Not now.

I wasn’t ready; this wasn’t fair. Especially not right before sending them to bed.

I was appalled. These were his children!

Tears started to fill every one of the kids’ eyes—they knew. There was no use trying to get around it. They were aware of the tension; they heard the fights.

Jerrica, Natalie, and Connor: the three most important people in my life.

I was about to devastate them and destroy our family, taking the blame alone.

In that moment, I hated Kenny. This was my punishment, his way to get back at me, and I would never forgive him for this. My ability to protect my children, to tell them on my terms, was being controlled by his manipulation.

I stood helpless in the middle of the room, warm from the blood flooding the skin of my cheeks and neck. The thumping in my ears, the sound of my beating heart, drowned out the noise of the TV. How could a heart beat when it was breaking?

“Tonight I told your father I wanted a divorce.”

Nine words. Enough to break promises, enough to break a family.

I felt hollow. My heart, crushed in a single life-changing moment, had shattered into countless irretrievable pieces.

That moment disintegrated into a fragmented tableau of several more: Kenny, his face in his hands sobbing, on the couch with a bewildered Connor, also crying. Jerrica in the recliner, Natalie on the loveseat. Both girls looked from me to their father, faces searching for an explanation. Jerrica moved to sit beside Kenny, and he collapsed into her chest, sobbing loudly.

In the blur of that moment, watching my children fall apart before my eyes, I had no idea what to do. I felt like I had said enough, but Kenny wouldn’t speak. He no longer mattered now. In fact, he and his passive-aggressive, childish ass could go to hell. Our children were what mattered, and they needed me.

I sat on the loveseat then, away from him, and wrapped my arm around Natalie. She fell against me, crying hard. No one spoke save the voices of a trashy MTV reality show, while minutes trickled into one another. The clock above the TV marked time, hands ticking along with the intermittent sniffles and broken sobs.

I did not cry. Instead I wondered what tomorrow would be like. If my children would hate me. How I would get through the school day. How Kenny would treat me when he got home from work.

I braced myself when I noticed the crying fading. I had to break this spell.

“It’s time for bed, kids.”

Jerrica, Natalie, and Connor quietly gave us both goodnight hugs and kisses and went to their rooms. I knew they would lie in their beds, still crying, awake for hours, probably angry with me.

This was all my fault, wasn’t it?

Kenny walked into our bedroom and shut the door. After more than twenty years together, I knew what he was thinking.

I hope you’re happy now.

But I wasn’t.

I had just broken the hearts of all the people I loved. I had broken my own.

None of us would ever be the same again.