The rain was falling hard outside the Manhattan courthouse when my husband handed me our divorce settlement and told me to sign it. Harrison stood beneath an umbrella with Khloe, the woman he had been sleeping with, while half my coat was left exposed to the freezing rain. Khloe pressed herself against him as though she were the one who needed protection, then glanced at me with a look she quickly disguised as concern. “Harrison, do you think Caroline will hate me?” she asked softly. He rubbed her back and said, “She won’t. You can’t force love.”

She pulled out a slim silver pen, but Harrison stopped her.

“Use yours,” he said to me.

“You always carry one.”

I almost smiled.

Of all the things about me he had forgotten, he still remembered that.

I reached into my leather tote and removed the black fountain pen I used for major contracts.

Harrison had once complained about it after seeing it on my desk.

Who wastes money on a pen when a two-dollar one works exactly the same?

I had told him it was a gift.

He had shrugged and forgotten about it.

The pen had been presented to me by the board of my first major company after our tenth international acquisition.

Only twenty existed.

Mine had later been appraised at more than one hundred thousand dollars.

Harrison was standing beneath an umbrella arguing over a four-million-dollar brownstone while I held a pen worth more than some people’s homes.

And he still believed he was taking the valuable things from me.

I placed the tip above the signature line.

“Have you thought this through?”

Harrison exhaled sharply.

“Caroline.”

“Once I sign, we’re completely done.”

“Of course I’ve thought it through.”

There was no hesitation in his answer.

“Stop dragging your feet.”

Khloe tightened her arm around him.

Harrison looked at her, and his expression softened immediately.

“You can’t force matters of the heart.”

So I signed.

Caroline Vance.

Five years of marriage reduced to one clean signature.

For one strange second, I remembered the first apartment Harrison and I had shared.

It had been a tiny studio in Queens where the radiator clanged all night and the shower took ten minutes to produce hot water.

We used to stand in grocery aisles calculating whether buying chicken meant putting the coffee back.

Harrison had been twenty-nine then, ambitious and hungry and charming in the reckless way only broke men with enormous dreams could be.

One night, after our landlord raised the rent, I found him sitting on the floor beside our mattress with his head in his hands.

I sat beside him.

“We’ll figure it out.”

He looked at me and said, “When I make it, I’m going to give you the best life I can.”

I believed him.

Maybe Harrison believed himself too.

What neither of us understood was that I would make it first.

At the beginning, he loved that.

When I got my first major promotion, he opened a bottle of cheap champagne and carried me around our apartment.