Seven Years as His Lie

Scarlett Hayes and York Lancaster grew up together, and she married him, or believed she did. Seven years of it: the mornings and the goodnights, and the business they built side by side. A lawyer comes to her one day and tells her flatly that the marriage was never registered, that it does not exist on paper, and that York's legal wife is a different woman. Scarlett does not ask him about it. She does not cry or throw anything. She smiles at him the way she always has, and over the next seven days she sells the company they built together, liquidates it, clears the accounts and closes the books. On the last evening, while York is out at a dinner, she puts her things in a suitcase and leaves. He comes home to an empty house and a document on the table that is not quite a divorce agreement, since there was no marriage to dissolve. He assumes she will cool off and come back, because she always has. When he does finally locate her, there is a man standing beside her wearing the ring York had thought was his.