The campus was beautiful, bathed in the golden light of late August. It was the perfect backdrop for a milestone I had been dreading and anticipating in equal measure.
We hugged Chloe one last time outside her dorm, promising to text, promising not to hover. As we walked back to the car, the silence between Mark and me felt heavy, but I interpreted it as a shared, poignant grief. We were empty nesters. The kids were raised. The job was done.
We dropped our youngest daughter off at college.
The drive home was two hours of emotional release. I leaned my head back against the seat, letting the tears fall. Mark reached over the center console and took my hand. His grip was firm, reassuring.
We cried together in the car on the way home, holding hands.
I squeezed his fingers, thinking about the future. Now it’s just us, I thought. We can go to Italy. We can turn Chloe’s room into a studio. We can fall in love all over again. I looked at his profile—stoic, handsome, a tear tracking down his cheek. I felt a surge of gratitude. We had survived the sleepless nights, the teenage rebellion, the tuition bills. We had made it to the finish line together.
Or so I thought.
Mark pulled the SUV into our driveway. The house looked welcoming, the porch light glowing in the twilight. He put the car in park. But he didn’t unbuckle. He didn’t turn to me to offer a “we did it” hug.
As soon as we pulled into driveway, he turned off the engine. The silence in the car changed. It wasn’t the comfortable silence of companionable grief anymore; it was the suffocating silence of a bomb about to detonate.
He stared straight ahead at the garage door.
“Ellen,” he said, his voice terrifyingly steady. “‘I’ve been waiting for this day for four years. I’m leaving.’“.
I blinked, waiting for the punchline. “What? Mark, you’re… you’re tired. It’s been a long day.”
“I’m not tired,” he said, finally turning to look at me. The warmth I had felt in his hand ten minutes ago was gone. His eyes were cold, dead things. “I promised myself I would stay until Chloe was moved in. I didn’t want to disrupt her high school years. But I have been done with this marriage since she was a freshman.”
“But…” I stammered, my brain misfiring. “We were just holding hands. You were crying.”
“I was crying because I’m relieved,” he said brutally. “And I was holding your hand because it was the last time I had to pretend.”
He opened the door and got out. I scrambled out after him, panic clawing at my throat.
“Mark, stop! You can’t just leave! Your clothes, your things…”
He walked to the back of the SUV and hit the button to open the trunk. The hatch rose slowly with a mechanical whir.
I looked inside. Next to the empty moving blankets we had used for Chloe’s mini-fridge sat two large, black suitcases.
His bags were already packed in the trunk.
He hadn’t packed them while I was sleeping. He had packed them before we even left for the college drop-off. While I was worrying about Chloe’s meal plan, he was carefully folding his shirts for a life without me. He had driven our daughter to her future with his own escape route sitting right behind the back seat.
A dark sedan pulled up to the curb. An Uber. He had timed it perfectly.
He hauled the bags out of the trunk.
“The lawyer will call you on Monday,” he said.
He didn’t look back. He got into the car and drove away, leaving me standing in the driveway of a house that was suddenly, violently empty—not just of children, but of the entire life I thought I was living.
