Chapter 13: YOU WANT TO DIVORCE ME?
Chapter 11
Lumi
I should have known better.
Whatever Ren sets his mind to is what he does, and I had spent enough days watching him operate to understand that arguing with him was roughly as useful as arguing with a lawyer.
Before the word what had fully left my mouth he was already on his phone, thumb moving across the screen with the calm efficiency of someone booking a cab, not a transatlantic flight.
And by the time I had gathered enough words to form an actual objection he had set the phone face down on the table and looked at me.
"Done," he said.
I stared at him. He picked his spoon back up.
I stood there with my mouth open, nothing useful coming out of it.
"How....?" He raised his brow, a cocky look on his face.
He looks and acts nothing like his age. I’m sure a stranger would think he’s older.
I shook my head slowly, because there was genuinely nothing left to say, then I went to my room to finish packing.
By the time I came out with my bags he was already back with his, standing at the door with his jacket on and one bag slung over his shoulder like this was something we had planned together for weeks.
He looked at me and said nothing, just tilted his head toward the door. I shook my head again and walked past him out of the house.
The flight was nine hours.
He took the window seat without asking, sat in it with his arms crossed and his head back.
I watched him fall asleep somewhere over the Atlantic while I sat beside him with a cup of tea going cold in my hands and watched the dark outside the small oval window.
The cabin was quiet around us. I sat in that particular suspension of a long flight where you are somewhere between two versions of your life and neither of them feels entirely real yet.
I thought about what I was going back to do.
The word for it sat in my chest, heavy and clean at the same time.
Divorce. It didn’t feel like defeat anymore. Somewhere between the run this morning, the two plates on the dining table and nine hours of dark sky it had started to feel like something else.
Something closer to an exhale, to the moment right after you have been carrying something for too long and you finally set it down and your arms remember what it is to be empty.
I glanced at Ren beside me.
His face in sleep was different from his face awake, the deliberate stillness gone, replaced by something that just was, no effort behind it.
He looked younger, not nineteen, not the version of him I had been carrying in my head for seven years, but somewhere in between.
I watched as his chest rose and fell. And I couldn’t match the version of Ren I met to the man sleeping beside me.
But the truth was, he still is the Ren I know. The Ren that’ll leave everything behind just for me.
I removed my face immediately after I caught myself smiling and staring at him.
"What are you doing, Lumi." I blew multiple air through my mouth. I felt hurt but I didn’t know why because the Ac was on.
.....
London was grey when we landed, which felt appropriate.
We took a cab from the airport and booked into a hotel close enough to the flat that I could walk if I needed to, though I had no intention of walking.
I and Ren took seperate rooms but opposite eachother.
The room smelled like new linen and the window looked out at a street I recognised, I stood at it for a moment with my hands in my pockets and let the familiarity of the city settle around me without letting it swallow me.
That night I slept with the weight of what I was about to do. I kept reminding myself that I needed to this.
That it was for the best. He asked for it and the best way is to leave and start afresh.
Starting afresh doesn’t mean I fail and I wasn’t going to be like my mum.
The next morning I was up before seven.
I knew Callum’s schedule the way I knew the layout of our flat, without having to think about it, the information simply there, lived in and accurate.
He would be in his office by nine but the first hour was always meetings so I waited, and when I got downstairs Ren was already sitting in the hotel restaurant with coffee in front of him and a second cup across the table.
I sat down.
He pushed the second cup toward me.
We drank in silence for a while and then he set his cup down and looked at me. "I’m coming with you."
"No."
"Lumi."
"Ren." I wrapped both hands around my cup and looked at him steadily. "I need to do this part alone. It has to be me walking through that door."
He held my gaze and I could see him weighing it, feel the resistance sitting behind his eyes.
I didn’t look away because I needed him to see that I meant it, that this wasn’t stubbornness or pride but something more necessary than both.
His jaw shifted. "You call me the second you’re out of that building."
"Yes."
"The second, Lumi."
"I said yes."
He looked at me for one more moment and then picked his cup back up. "Fine."
I dressed carefully that morning, not for him, not for the office, but for myself, and when I looked in the mirror before I left I held my own gaze for three full seconds.
Yes, this was Lumi. Then I walked out.
.....
The building was familiar in a way that sat oddly in my body, like stepping into a memory that hadn’t finished being a memory yet.
His employees saw me before I saw them and I caught it in my side vision, the small adjustments, the stilled conversations, heads turning and not quite turning back.
I kept my chin level, my shoulders straight and I walked through the lobby like I had every right to be there, because I did.
His assistant was on her feet before I reached the glass door.
"Miss Lumi." I stopped.
Not Mrs. Reed. Not Ms. Reed.
Miss Lumi.
So the news had already moved through the building and rearranged itself into something people understood and were working with. I let a small, unhurried smile settle on my face and kept walking.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Sienna who filled her in and insisted they called me by my name.
"You can’t go in right now, he’s..." I acted like I didn’t hear her and pushed the door open.
My steps paused as walked in and registered what was happening.
Callum in his chair. Sienna across his desk, her blouse half open, both of them turning toward the door with the particular arrested quality of people who were somewhere else entirely a second ago.
I looked at them and watched as they stared with widened eyes, neither of them spoke.
I reached back without looking and pulled the door behind me until it clicked, then I crossed the room, lifted a chair from against the wall, placed it in front of his desk and sat down in it, one leg crossed over the other, hands loose in my lap.
Something in me was very, very still. Stiller than I had been in weeks, the kind of still that sits on the other side of all the noise once the noise is finally done.
Ren’s face moved through my mind for a single second, that particular quality of stillness he carried.
And I thought, so this is what it feels like to learn something from someone without meaning to.
I extended one hand toward them, palm up, an open and easy gesture.
"Please," I said. "Take your time. I’m not in a hurry."
Callum’s face did something complicated. Sienna went very still.
I kept the smile, not wide, not sharp, just present, and I watched them gather themselves in the silence, the small scramble of hands and fabric, two people reassembling their dignity in front of someone who had stopped needing theirs to depend on theirs a long time ago.
When they were done I uncrossed my legs and sat forward slightly and looked at Callum.
"So." My voice came out clean and even and entirely my own. "Where are they?"
They both stared at me. A furrow moved across both their foreheads at the same moment and I almost pressed my fingers to my temple because surely, surely they were not this slow.
I let one beat pass.
"The divorce papers." I held Callum’s eyes. "Where are they so I can sign?"
The colour left his face in a slow, visible drain, and his eyes went wide in a way I had never quite seen on him before, not the shock of being caught, not the guilt of the hallway that first night, but something rawer than both, something that looked almost like the moment a person realises they have fundamentally misread every single thing.
"You want to divorce me?"
