Page 5 of Shattered Hearts

The cologne reaches me before logic can intervene. It drifts across the aisle between us and wraps itself around something in my chest that I thought I had successfully removed with twelve months of distance and silence and early morning walks through Toledo in the cold. It's the same one he's worn since he was nineteen. I bought him the first bottle. He always said it was the only one that worked on his skin, that every other one went wrong somehow, turned sour within an hour.

I used to say that meant I knew him better than he knew himself.

I face forward and press my thumbnail into my palm underneath the table where no one can see.

I won’t cry.

We arrived early to avoid the cameras outside. He didn't. I saw it on my phone while we were waiting in the small side room they gave us, the flashes going off as he walked up the courthouse steps, one hand raised slightly, not waving exactly but acknowledging. He always said the best part of being a professional footballer was the recognition. Being known. Being wanted in a room before you'd even opened your mouth. I used to find it charming. The boy from the village who made it and never stopped being grateful for the noise that came with it.

I understand now, sitting here in my navy dress from the woman with the sewing machine, that in a way I married my father. Someone who needed to be the best at what he did and to be seen for it. Someone whose identity lived outside the house in the eyes of other people, while the women who loved them quietly held everything else together and asked for very little in return.

"All rise as Judge Rodriguez enters."

I stand on legs that don't feel like mine. My hands are shaking so I press them flat against my thighs and stare straight ahead. Last room. Last hour. Then I go home.

Judge Rodriguez settles herself behind the bench. Silver hair, reading glasses on a chain. She pours water, opens a folder, looks up and her eyes move across the room, landing on his side first and then mine, and I feel the blood rise in my face.

I haven't looked at Jorge since he walked in. I know exactly where he is the way you know where a bruise is without touching it.

"The petitioner, Elena Alvarez, seeks dissolution of marriage on the grounds of infidelity," Diego says from my left, his voice quiet and carrying precisely as far as it needs to. "The parties have observed the statutory separation period of twelve months. All documentation has been submitted and verified by this court. There are no contested assets and no children. My client requests that the court proceed to finalize the dissolution today."

Infidelity. Diego says it the way you'd read a weather report but it moves through me like a current anyway, because one word doesn't come close to covering what happened. The baby. The fact that while I was lying in clinic after clinic letting strangers tell me what was wrong with my body, bleeding hope out every single month, Jorge was already someone's father. I grip the edge of my chair until my knuckles ache and fix my eyes on the wall above the judge's left shoulder and breathe through the nausea that has lived just below my throat for nearly a year, and shows no sign of leaving.

Señor Fuentes rises. "Your Honor, the respondent does not contest the petition. Señor Alvarez accepts the grounds as presented and does not oppose the dissolution."

"Señor Alvarez. You may address the court."

Jorge's chair scrapes back.

The sound goes straight through me.

I press my thumbnail hard into my palm and stare at the wall.

"I made choices," he says, low, directed at the bench, and then he pauses the way he always pauses, gathering himself in that stillness he has, and I hate that I still know every single thing about him. "That destroyed something I didn't understand the value of until it was gone. I'm not here to dispute anything presented to this court today. I take full responsibility for the breakdown of this marriage."

I want to ask him which part he'd like to take credit for first. Was it her specifically, or just the fact that she was there and I wasn't. She got to give him the one thing I couldn't.

I press my thumb harder into my palm.

"Señora Alvarez. You may address the court."

I stand too fast and my heel catches but I don't go down. I look at Judge Rodriguez and I open my mouth and I say it.

"This marriage is over, Your Honor. What happened between us didn't leave any room for doubt about that, and the year we've spent apart hasn't changed it, it just made it clearer. I'm ready to sign whatever needs signing and I would like to do that today."

My voice only shakes once.

The courtroom is quiet when I stop. Judge Rodriguez looks from me to Jorge, before she opens the folder.

"I've sat in this courtroom for twenty-three years." Unhurried. Even. "I've presided over a great many dissolutions. Some of them were the right decision for everyone involved. In my experience, the ones that move through this courtroom fastest are frequently the ones that arrive unfinished."

Diego's pen stops moving.

"The law affords me certain discretions in cases where I believe a measured period of reflection would serve the interests of both parties. I'm going to exercise one of those discretions today."

"Your Honor," Diego starts.

She raises one hand.