Corinne's Victory

Darius returned to Corinne before I had finished clearing his things from the apartment.

I found out through a screenshot Nadine sent by mistake. Corinne had posted a photograph of two wineglasses on a table, a man's hand resting beside one stem. At the edge of the frame, I could make out my name in his tattoo.

The caption read: What is meant for you will return healed.

I enlarged the image, then went back to the word healed.

Had he stopped drinking? Found work? Paid anyone back? Did Lena know when to expect his calls? The photograph offered two glasses and his familiar hand.

For several days, I read their posts with my phone held low in my lap, though there was no one in the room to see. Restoration. Alignment. God's timing. Corinne wrote like a woman announcing a victory and calling it an answered prayer. Nothing about the drinking or the unpaid bills. In my apartment, his things still occupied shelves I needed.

For a while I called what I felt jealousy, because jealousy was easier to admit than contempt.

But I was not competing with Corinne, and I did not want her to learn anything. I had watched her work. She had waited out a marriage and a string of women, and when a frightened man needed somewhere soft to land, she was standing there with scripture ready. She had not taken something from me. She had collected what I had finally put down.

My therapist asked what would happen if he became better with her. She rested her pen across her notebook and waited.

I pressed my fingertips into the chair's upholstered arm.

"Then I paid for the renovation and she got the house," I said.

"Was he a house?"

"You know what I mean," I said, looking at the pen instead of her.

"I do. Do you?"

I had been treating whatever life he made with Corinne as a verdict on mine. It was not one. She had never been my measure. A woman whose whole method is to be available when a man is at his worst is not competition; she is the next chapter of his pattern. Nothing she did in Virginia altered what had happened in our apartment. I had already stayed through it.

I deleted the screenshots, including the photograph of his hand. My name went with it.