The Divorce Party

He Wrote It Down. She Kept Every Page She Could.

This is the opening page of Echoes of Shadows, my memoir.

The marital tie on fire

Prologue

In the back of the storage unit off the lobby downstairs sits a box of handwritten letters. Some are typed, some are hers, but most are written in elegant, perfect cursive on stained yellow legal paper with a .5mm-tip blue ball-point pen. He wrote it down. She kept every page she could.

One night in late summer 2024, shortly after the divorce papers were signed, Johanna carted that entire box, along with a few others, out to the fire pit she had never used. She gathered her four children and their partners around. It was her Divorce Party, and they had all shown up. She had invited others, but only the kids dared to show. On the fire, she placed the framed invitation from her wedding, now 25 years past. Watched as their names flickered in the flames. Other things from the wedding she had preserved, and now watched burn: his tie; her hairpiece. Little cherubs filled with bubbles to blow. The guest book. The pen they used to sign the wedding contract. Pieces of ribbon.

She thought she'd feel more cleansed, or like she was letting go, but instead she just felt sad. As she looked at that box of letters, Johanna thought of her dad, and the manuscript she was working on, and she suddenly changed her mind. "Take that box back upstairs," she told Toby, "and grab the marshmallows."

Outro

Echoes of Shadows is built from that box: his letters, his journals, his court-ordered homework — his words exactly as he wrote them, and mine around them. It follows two road trips fifty years apart, one archive, and the question of who gets to say what happened.

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