My relationship with my ex ended with us facing each other in a courtrooma stage where no one truly wins or loses, for in love both partners share the blame.
But theres no escaping the peculiar truth: my second wife discovered passion in the arms of a man named Henry, an affluent entrepreneur who drifted into our city years ago, only to plant a quirky little café on the corner of a street that seemed to bend in impossible ways. In the beginning she tried to conceal their union, but eventually it became so obvious that hiding was pointless, like trying to mask the sound of thunder with a whisper.
One day, she came to me, her presence as sudden as the appearance of a clock without hands, and announced with dreamlike certainty that she was filing for divorce. She wanted half our homea house filled with staircases going nowhere and windows opening onto foggy fields. She half expected me to unravel, to fret over losing what she claimed was hers. But the house had been bought with my own honest pounds sterling, earned in a world where the sun sometimes blinked twice before rising. She had nothing to do with its purchaseaside from living there for two years, floating through rooms as if searching for something lost long ago. Now she dared to stake her claim.
I met her greed with serene indifference, as if listening to rain speak in riddles. I didn’t bother coaxing her out of her decision. I simply awaited the verdict, knowing she would lose her case and pay the court feesa sum not much less than a monthly mortgage and just as elusive. My experience with my first wife had taught me caution; that ordeal spiraled through three cloudy years in court, each meeting ending in cacophonous drama, like an orchestra tuning forever.
Yet, my first wife found a clever solicitor, and, as if plucking a feather from a phoenix, she managed to pry away half my inheritancethe house left to me by my late father, a place lined with echoing memories and silent histories.
But with my second marriage, I became wiseror perhaps simply more peculiar. Before tying the knot, I owned a flat, which I’d painstakingly restored, sanding floors until the grains spoke in English verses. I cleverly had it registered under my brother’s namea man I trust as much as the sky trusts the horizon. And when the time for divorce swirled in, it appeared I had nothing to give. After losing everything once, no woman would ever trick me again; not in this land of double-decker buses, tea that brews forever, and houses that dream themselves into existence.
