Page 189 of Top Shelf

My fingers brush the envelope inside my jacket. It has been there all night, and it feels heavier than it did when I arrived. This morning, I sat at the kitchen table in our temporary apartment and signed my name to the divorce papers my lawyer sent through. Ebba was right—paper does not decide what Heidi is to me.

A contract did not make me love her, and a divorce document could never make me stop.

I stay near the edge of the room and watch for a while, but eventually I make the decision I have been avoiding all night. I step away from the crowd, and head down the hallway toward Heidi’s office. Her name is on the door.

DR. HEIDI GRANT: FOUNDER

Her office is quiet compared with the noise outside. The door is already open, and I stand on the threshold taking it in. There are files stacked across the side of her desk, a coffee cup beside her laptop, and a photograph from Solvik propped near the edge of the shelf. I recognize the meadow before I recognize myself in it.

Then I see the Pink Lady. The sparkly lamp sits in the corner beside a small armchair, throwing a warm pool of light across the wall. The lamp that has been her constant, the piece of herself she’s brought with her through every stage of her life. Now it is here, in the office with her name on the door, woven into the place she built for herself.

My chest aches, and I look at the envelope in my hand. The blue ribbon suddenly looks even more ridiculous. Months ago, Heidi asked for signed divorce papers tied in a tasteful bow as a studio-warming gift. At the time, the joke belonged to two people who thought the end of this marriage was something they both understood.

Now I set the envelope on her desk and feel sick.

“Jesus Christ.”

I whirl around to see Mila leaning against the doorway with a tray of canapés balanced in her hand, staring at me. Her gaze drops to envelope, and then the ribbon.

“Tell me that isn’t what I think it is.”

I look back at the desk. “It depends what you think it is.”

“Papers that start with ‘d’ and rhyme with horse.”

“That is not a category.”

Mila steps into the office and sets the canapé tray beside the papers. “Are you planning to leave that here and disappear?”

“No.” I shake my head. “I was not going to disappear.”

Her eyes narrow, but she looks back toward the hallway when Heidi’s laugh carries faintly through the noise. Mila picks up the canapé tray again, then seems to reconsider and pushes it into my hands instead.

“Hold these.”

I frown. “Why?”

“Because I need both hands to fix something out there, and because you look like you require a task.”

“How many of these little pancake puffs are there?”

“They’re salmon cream cheese puffs. And there’s seventy-two.”

I look down. “Why do you know the exact number?”

“Because I ordered them.”

Then she walks away, and I stand in Heidi’s office holding seventy-two canapés beside the divorce papers I suddenly know I cannot leave behind. A minute later, footsteps slow outside the door, and I look up, expecting Mila to relieve me of my salmon cream puff holding duties.

But Heidi is standing there in the doorway, eyes moving from the canapés in my hand to the envelope on her desk, locked on the ribbon. She steps in slowly, closing the door behind her. For a moment, neither of us speaks.

“Heidi,” I say.

Her gaze lifts from the envelope to my face. “You came.”

“Yes.”

“But when I looked for you, you’d disappeared.”