Minimal for Me, Everything for Her Chapter 10

Minimal for Me, Everything for Her Chapter 10

On my first birthday after the divorce, I ordered a very small cake.

No party.

No suite filled with roses.

A few friends came over for dinner.

Some gifts were expensive.

Some weren’t.

Someone brought perfume.

Someone brought a book.

Someone brought a bouquet of white lisianthus.

I accepted all of them.

Liking beautiful things didn’t make me shallow.

Having expectations wasn’t wrong.

What was wrong was someone demanding that you deny yourself while giving all the warmth meant for you

to someone else.

Adrian sent me one message that day.

Happy birthday.

I read it and deleted it.

Later, a mutual friend told me he’d sold the house.

When the buyers toured it, only one wedding photo remained in the living room.

The real-estate agent asked whether he wanted it removed.

Adrian stood there for a long time.

“Leave it.”

But on the day the house changed hands, the photo still ended up in the recycling pile.

No one wanted to preserve a failed marriage for two strangers.

Sienna returned most of the gifts.

For the things she’d already sold, she repaid the judgment in installments.

She came to see me once.

That day, she carried no designer bag.

She wore no jewelry.

“Nora, I really did think of you as my friend once.”

“When?”

She had no answer.

“You liked watching me envy you.”

“You liked that Adrian favored you behind my back.”

“It wasn’t that you didn’t know it would hurt me.”

“You just thought the longer it took me to find out, the longer you got to feel like you’d won.”

Sienna lowered her head.

“I thought he’d choose me in the end.”

“He never chose either of us.”

Adrian had chosen a convenient wife and an exception who fed his vanity.

He wanted the stability of marriage and the thrill of romance.

He just never imagined the two women he’d assigned those roles to would both leave.

After Sienna left, I put the repayment acknowledgment she’d brought into a drawer.

A year later, I moved again.

My new place wasn’t large, but it wasn’t sparse either.

There were pillows on the couch.

Photos on the walls.

Flowers from friends on the dining table.

There was still half a cake in the fridge that I hadn’t finished.

On moving day, the building manager brought me an old cardboard box.

“Ms. Bennett, someone asked us to pass this along. They said it belongs to you.”

I opened it.

Inside was our wedding photo.

The cracked frame had been replaced.

A note was taped to the back.

I couldn’t fix it anymore.

Five words.

No request.

No explanation.

I folded the note and put it in the paper recycling bin with the photo.

That evening, when I went downstairs, Adrian stood across the street.

He didn’t come over.

We looked at each other for a few seconds with a lane of traffic between us.

He raised one hand as if he meant to wave.

Then slowly lowered it.

I turned and walked into a florist.

The clerk asked, “Is this for someone else or for you?”

“For me.”

“What do you like?”

I pointed to the white lisianthus by the window.

“That bouquet.”

At the register, she tied a pale green ribbon around the stems.

I carried the flowers outside.

Adrian was gone.

Back home, I trimmed the stems and arranged them in a glass vase.

My phone buzzed with a reminder.

It was the wedding anniversary reminder I’d once set so he wouldn’t forget..

I opened the app and deleted the date that had repeated for four years.

The lisianthus shifted gently on the table.

I turned my phone face down and cut into the cake my friends had brought.

The frosting was a little too sweet.

This time, no one told me it was wasteful.

No one else got to decide what was worth having.

As the city lights came on outside, I poured myself a cup of hot tea.

Flowers on the table.

Half a cake left.

My life wasn’t minimalist at all.

It was exactly right.

—The End—