“Let’s be honest, Nancy, without me you’re just the girl who answers the phones.”

Wayne said it with a glass of scotch in his hand. He wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring out the sliding glass door toward the backyard, like he was already planning the new landscaping he’d do with his girlfriend.

He was forty-seven years old, and he had the unearned confidence of a man who had spent twenty-six years being told he was the smartest person in the room.

He told me he was leaving for Brittany, our thirty-one-year-old office manager. He said it like he was announcing a change in the supply chain, not destroying our marriage. He told me he was taking Coleman Heating and Air with him. He said he built it from nothing. He said I’d be fine in the house, but that I should probably look into a career that didn’t involve “answering phones and drinking coffee.”

I didn’t argue. I didn’t throw the glass of scotch at his head. I just stood there. I remember the hum of the refrigerator in the silence that followed his speech. It was the only sound in the house for a long minute.

“Are you going to say something?” he asked. He sounded annoyed that I wasn’t crying.

“I’m just listening,” I said.

That was the truth. I was listening to the sound of twenty-six years of my life being reduced to a clerical error. I was listening to him tell me how he’d already moved the main company accounts to a new bank in the next county. He had it all worked out. He had the crew on board. He had the vendors lined up. He even had a plan for how to “modernize” the office, which I knew meant firing me and hiring someone who wouldn’t notice when he skimmed the petty cash for his dinners with Brittany.

He walked out the front door ten minutes later, leaving me in the kitchen. I didn’t follow him. I didn’t beg. I just finished my coffee. It was cold by then.

Wayne and I started that company in a detached garage in 1998. It was a joke back then. We had one dented van that leaked oil on every driveway in Marion, and a loan from my father for $4,200. I still remember the smell of that garage. It smelled like old insulation and despair.

For twenty-six years, I was the one who made it real. I answered the phones, yes. But I also taught myself how to read a balance sheet when our first accountant stole our tax money. I spent my weekends sitting in a cold, fluorescent-lit room taking state contractor exams. I failed the first time. I failed the second time. Wayne didn’t even bother trying the third time because he said the code books were “written by people who never held a wrench.”