My name is Clara Jensen, I was thirty-four years old the night my marriage ended, and if you had told me even a week before that I would be divorced before I fully understood how broken my life already was, I would have laughed right in your face.
Not because Ethan and I were wildly in love. We weren’t. Not anymore, maybe not for a long time. But we were established. Functional. Polished from the outside in that way long relationships often are when the people inside them have become experts at performing normal. We had a tidy house in a quiet neighborhood, a kitchen with soft-close cabinets I’d picked out myself, a joint calendar color-coded by who needed the car when, and a marriage that looked, from the front lawn, like a life.