I said, “Read what?”

I heard him groan on the other end. “What your lawyer has in mind. I have given you what you wanted, which was space. But enough is enough.”

“We agreed to get a divorce before I left.”

“No, Christina, you agreed to get a divorce. And then you packed a suitcase and ran off.”

“You sent me that package DHL.”

There was silence as he came to understand that I hadn’t read that either. “Christina,” he said. “You have to read the documents. If we do go through with this, you will be in a bad position. You should know that.” He had never intended for me to sign anything. He had only meant to scare me by showing me some figures. “Whatever you make from your teaching and your articles doesn’t even cover your clothing budget.”

“I don’t want to have this conversation,” I said.

“Well, you’re not prepared for it.” This was the familiar condescension. “And if you haven’t noticed, you didn’t leave me and achieve a life of independence. You’re mooching off your aunt. You can’t do it, Christina. And we don’t have to fight about this, because you are coming back. I know it, and you know it.”

I knew no such thing but couldn’t manage a response.

“You need to grow up,” he said, and then—with his usual lack of ceremony—he rang off.

I threw the phone onto the bed like it was toxic, then headed to the kitchen to see if there was any beer in the house. Maybe I did need to grow up, but the prospect did not appeal. My husband and I were pursuing different lines of action. I wanted the divorce; he wanted the marriage. We again diverged on the narratives of what had caused our relationship to falter. He thought he’d been neglectful, egomaniacal, and likely that I had found out about an earlier affair with a coworker named Blaire, which I had, but that had nothing to do with my wanting to leave. My husband’s fault, in the end, had been to mistakenly think he knew me when he didn’t, a delusion that made him unwilling to try for more. In one of our final arguments, he’d said to me: Don’t you know what marriage is? What it means? He’d meant it ironically, but sitting at the kitchen table in my bathrobe, rolling a now-empty wineglass between the palms of my hands, I realized that I didn’t.