My Ex-Wife Will Kneel Before Me

His Roots

Chapter 7

The revolving doors of Westfield Capital Management spun behind Ryan as he stepped out onto the sidewalk. The afternoon sun hit his face and he stood still for a moment, breathing in the warm air like a man who had just been released from a cage.

He looked back at the glass tower behind him. Seven years of his life were inside that building. Seven years of early mornings and late nights and missed birthdays and weekends spent at his desk while Jessica went wherever she pleased with whoever she pleased.

And he felt nothing.

No regret. No fear. No panic about what came next. Just a deep, steady calm that spread through his chest like the first real breath after nearly drowning.

When did I stop being myself?

He walked to his car and sat behind the wheel without turning the engine on. The question kept turning in his head, and the answers came one after another like dominoes falling.

I stopped playing guitar because Jessica thought it was too loud. I stopped watching football on Sundays because her parents always came over for brunch. I stopped running in the mornings because she wanted me to drive the girls to preschool. I stopped seeing my college friends because she thought they were beneath us.

I changed everything. My schedule. My clothes. My diet. My hobbies. My voice. I bent myself into the shape of a man she could tolerate, and she repaid me by sleeping with someone else and letting me raise his children.

He pulled out his phone and dialed Harris.

The older man picked up on the second ring, his voice cautious. "Ryan. I hope you've had a chance to reconsider."

"I have." Ryan leaned back in his seat. "And the answer is still no."

"Ryan, listen to me carefully. You're making a decision right now that will follow you for the rest of your career. The board is not going to forget this."

"Good. I don't want them to."

"Five hundred thousand a year, Ryan. Three million in dividends. You're throwing away generational wealth over a personal matter that could easily be resolved with a bit of patience."

"Patience?" Ryan almost laughed. "You're asking me to be patient about my wife having two children with another man while I played house for ten years. That's not a personal matter, Harris. That's my entire life being built on a lie."

Silence on the other end.

"I'm not staying married to that woman. Not for five years. Not for five minutes. Not for five hundred thousand dollars and not for five hundred million." His voice was steady and clear. "Whatever consequences come from that, I'll deal with them."

"You don't understand what you're up against."

"Maybe not. But I understand who I am for the first time in a very long time, and that's worth more than anything your board can offer."

He ended the call and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat.

For a while he just sat there, watching people walk past the car on the busy sidewalk. Businessmen in suits. Women with shopping bags. A kid on a skateboard nearly crashing into a fire hydrant. Normal life. The kind he had forgotten existed while he was trapped inside the Palmer family's golden cage.

I need to go home. Not the house in Westfield. Home. Real home.

He turned the key in the ignition and pulled onto the highway heading south.

The drive was two hundred miles through flat farmland and small towns with names like Cedar Falls and Millbrook and Pine Ridge. The further he got from Westfield, the lighter he felt. By the time he crossed the county line into Ridgewood, the town where he grew up, the tension in his shoulders had melted away completely.

His parents' house was a small blue ranch at the end of Maple Street. The paint was peeling in a few spots and the porch railing needed fixing, but the flower beds were full and the front yard was freshly mowed. His mother's car was parked in the driveway.

He knocked twice and let himself in.

The smell hit him before anything else. Pot roast. Slow cooked with onions and carrots and rosemary, the way his mother had been making it since he was a boy. His eyes actually stung from the wave of memory that came with it.

"Ryan?" His mother appeared from the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on a dish towel. Her face lit up with pure surprise. "Oh my God. What are you doing here?"

"Just wanted to see you, Mom." He crossed the room and wrapped his arms around her. She was shorter than he remembered, and thinner, and her hair had more gray than the last time he visited. But her hug was exactly the same. Tight and warm and full of the kind of love that did not ask for anything in return.

"You should have called! I would have made more food." She pulled back and looked him up and down. "You look tired. Are you eating enough? You're too thin."

"I'm fine, Mom."

"You're not fine. I can see it on your face." She cupped his cheeks in her hands and studied him with the sharp eyes that only mothers possess. "Something happened. What's wrong?"

"Can we eat first? I'll tell you everything over dinner."

She hesitated, then nodded. "Sit down. The roast is almost ready."

They sat at the same kitchen table where Ryan had eaten every meal from birth to eighteen. The plates were chipped and the tablecloth had a coffee stain that had been there since 2009, and none of it mattered because it was real. It was honest. Nothing in this house had ever pretended to be something it was not.

His mother set a heaping plate in front of him and sat across the table with her own.

"Alright." She folded her hands. "Talk to me."

Ryan set his fork down and looked at his mother. He had rehearsed this conversation in his head for the entire drive, trying to find the gentlest way to say it. But there was no gentle way. There was only the truth.

"I'm getting a divorce, Mom."

Her expression did not change right away. She processed the words slowly, the way she always did with important things, turning them over before reacting.

"Why?"

"Jessica has been having an affair. I don't know how long. But I got paternity tests done on both girls." He paused. The next words felt like swallowing broken glass. "Neither one of them is mine."

His mother's face went white. She gripped the edge of the table and her lips pressed together into a thin, trembling line. For a long moment she did not speak. She just stared at her son with eyes that were filling with tears she was trying very hard not to shed.

"Both of them?" Her voice was barely a whisper.

"Both of them."

"Oh, Ryan." She pressed her hand over her mouth. "Oh, my poor boy."

"Mom, please don't cry. I'm okay. I've already made my decision."

"You are not okay." She reached across the table and grabbed his hand. "Ten years. You gave that woman ten years of your life. You worked yourself to the bone. You gave up everything. Your friends. Your music. Your weekends. You gave up coming home to see us because she always had some event or some dinner or some trip that came first."

Her voice shook, but there was iron underneath it.

"And she did this to you?"

"Yeah." He squeezed her hand. "She did."

His mother wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist and straightened in her chair. "Then you divorce her. You take whatever the law says is yours and you walk away."

"That's the plan."

"And the girls?"

Ryan's jaw tightened. "They're not mine, Mom. Not by blood."

"I know what the test says." Her voice was gentle but firm. "I'm asking how you feel about them."

He looked down at his plate. "I love them. I'll always love them. But I can't keep living in that house, pretending everything is fine, while Jessica and her family treat me like I'm the one who did something wrong."

His mother nodded slowly. "Then you do what you need to do. And you come home as often as you need to. This door is always open."

"Thanks, Mom."

She stood up, walked around the table, and kissed the top of his head. "Now finish your roast. You're too skinny and I don't want to hear any arguments."

Ryan smiled for the first time in days. A real smile. The kind that reached his eyes.

After the meal, he pushed back from the table and grabbed his jacket.

"Where's Dad?"

"Down at the old chapel. They're tearing it down this week to build the new community center. Your father volunteered to help with the heavy lifting because he still thinks he's twenty five." She shook her head. "Go find him before he throws his back out again."

Ryan kissed her cheek and walked out the front door.

Afterward, Ryan set out to find his father at the old town chapel, which was currently being demolished to make way for a new community center, leaving behind the heavy baggage of his failed marriage as he reconnected with his roots.