And I want to tell you what those six days did to me, because it’s the real story. They did not break me. They rebuilt me. Because in watching Elon clearly, without the fog of exhaustion and denial and the desperate wifely hope that had blurred my vision for two years, I finally saw the whole shape of what my marriage had been. And I saw, too, the whole shape of what I had let myself become. The disappearing woman. The absorber of hurts. The manager of moods. And in the cold clarity of my grief, I felt that woman start to burn away, and someone else start to emerge from underneath her, someone I hadn’t been since before I met Elon, someone with a spine.
I was not, I realized, going to fight to save this marriage. That option had died on my kitchen counter, through the speaker of a phone. Elon didn’t want to be married to me, and now that I’d heard him say it, in his own relaxed voice, I found I didn’t want to be married to him either. The question was not how to save it. The question was how to end it, on my terms, in a way that reclaimed everything he’d taken from me, my dignity, my sense of myself, my voice.
Meanwhile, I prepared.
I did the practical things first, the things my newly cold and clear mind understood were necessary. I quietly consulted a lawyer, a good one, a divorce attorney who specialized in exactly these situations. I learned my rights. I learned about custody, about our finances, about the fact that I was in a stronger position than I’d realized, that as the primary caregiver of an infant I had significant standing, that Elon’s income and our shared assets were subject to division regardless of whose name was on what. I gathered documentation, quietly, the financial records, and yes, I found ways to preserve the evidence of the affair, because it turned out Elon was not nearly as careful as he thought, and a woman who is watching closely and is no longer blinded by hope can find a great deal.
I was not going to be the small agreeable wife in the divorce either. I was going to protect myself and my daughter completely, and I did the unglamorous work to make sure I could.
