My back makes contact with the hotel room door as it clicks closed, and I dissolve into a blubbering mess of sobs.

All I wanted to do in the coffee shop, the place that used to be ours, was crawl onto Theo’s lap and bury my face in his beard.

I had seen the change in his face, how his expression had gone from a haunted sadness to rage in the blink of an eye. He thought I was using him to get ahead. Good, let him think that. Let him hate me. It would be the thing that ultimately led him to leave me.

Or for me to leave him. I couldn’t stop his words from echoing in my head. You have to vow to leave me forever.

I would be the bad guy, I would take it. If it meant saving us both from the sinking ship that was our marriage, I’d be the villain.

And I’d said the word, the one I feared the most. Divorce.

Suddenly, as if my body was having a physical reaction to even thinking about the failure of my marriage, my stomach rolled.

I steady myself, hand on my gut, sucking in long breaths of air. It was no use, because right then, my stomach rolled and my throat became sickly sweet with saliva and my hands went clammy.

Running to the bathroom, I make it to the toilet just in time as I vomit my guts into the bowl. My hands grip the cold porcelain, and I come up gasping for a lungful as my eyes water.

The tile is cool against my legs as I sit on the ground once more, my pencil skirt riding up. Jesus, I’m in such a low place that even my body knows it should be sick.

Divorce. The word brought such a negative connotation, especially at such a young age. I was only thirty, and I’d soon be a divorced woman.

I think I’d been holding it in for so long, even before I’d left Theo, that now, it was all bubbling to the surface. The tears I’d been forbidding rushed out in long, deep crying jags.

For the loss of my marriage.

For the judgment I’d receive whenever I told someone I was divorced.

For the love that I still felt that I would have to lock in the back of my heart.

For the thought that I would never again lie down next to the man I love and wish him good night.

The wide expanse of deep, soul-crushing sadness swallows me whole and I give in to it.

And God … how he’d looked. My husband was the definition of tall, dark, handsome, strong and silent. Check all the boxes, circle all of the above. He was brooding and bearded, and he’d huddled over the table as if trying to protect his six-foot-five frame from me, a pixie compared to him.

Picking myself up off the floor, I wipe my cheeks with the backs of my hands. Makeup smeared on my skin, I go to the unfamiliar, sterile sink to splash water on my face.

Dragging myself to the suitcase I’d pushed into the corner, I rifle through and dig out my comfiest sweatpants and the Nantucket sweatshirt that still smelled of my home. That unique, encompassing smell that defined you whenever someone foreign entered your home.

The channel is set to some cooking show when I turn the TV on, and I find myself staring at it like a zombie. Usually, cooking shows make me hungry, but tonight, I have no appetite whatsoever.

I grab my phone from the nightstand where I placed it, and immediately regret opening it. There is a notification from Google Photos about a picture I’d taken a year ago. My thumb accidentally swipes it, and there we are, Theo and I, grinning into the selfie lens at some restaurant we’d been at.

We look effortlessly happy, and it makes my eyes start to fill with tears once more.

Exiting the app and opening a text message, I start to type.

There is no immediate response, and I put my cell down on the hotel comforter as I watch the chef on TV whip up a creamy Alfredo sauce. The bed vibrates, and I look at the screen, surprised that she answered me.

A second later.

Wow. I didn’t expect all that, as it was my place to apologize to her. Nicole Teller, nee Jorgensen, is my best friend from college. Or … was? We hadn’t spoken in three months, until just right now.

Growing up in the environment and social class that I had, most of my female peers had been viewed as competition, and they’d seen me the same way. Girl friends were hard to come by, and most of the time, they stabbed you in the back and then the front, all with a quiet grin on their face and a manicured finger fiddling with their vintage pearl earrings.

And then I’d gone to college in Boston and been paired with my roommate, a fast-talking theater arts major from New York City. Nicole was fierce and opinionated, a liberal in a sea of cardigan-wearing conservative women who wasn’t afraid to curse or have casual sex. She opened my eyes to the world, gave me my first hit of marijuana, introduced me to the play Kinky Boots and showed me that having my own thoughts outside of my families was an okay thing to do. Nicole was the one who held my hair back when I got sick the first time I drank tequila, and she was the best friend I’d ever had.

Except when things started to strain, about two years ago. She’d gotten married to a theater director, Ozzie, shortly before the worst month of my entire life. They bought a beautiful loft in Boston, and four months after their honeymoon had found out they were pregnant. My goddaughter, Odette, was born nine months after that, and they were the happiest little family I knew.

I couldn’t deal with it. Theo and I were struggling, caught in this downward spiral of marital problems and infertility. I became jealous, enraged. How could she do this to me? Go and get all of the things I’d ever wanted, while my life was falling apart. The one who never wanted to get married or have a baby … and she’d done them all and was flourishing.

For the past two years, my soul was ugly and dark. I wanted the people closest to me spiraling down the same black hole of despair I was in, and if they weren’t, I pushed them away. It was why I needed to end my marriage.

To save myself.

Even with the hurtful things I’d slung at her last time we talked, she was being a good friend. And it was time that I began to mend the broken fences in my life.

A trip to Boston might be exactly what I need right now, although I still have to put up this front of marriage. For my parents. To set myself up for starting my life over.

I’ll take the drive, at some point. But right now, I’m just happy to be communicating with my best friend again. It feels like a step forward, as if who I used to be before all of the heartbreak is slowly standing up and dusting herself off.