She found an apartment across the street from the house he lives in, the house he made her leave, the house they had bought together years ago, whose floor tiles she had laid by hand, whose cracking walls she had painted, whose surly garden she had weeded, whose broken bones she had put back together one by one so it could be a home for her children.

Her new place is new. Its new stove does not rattle with each bump of her hip. Its new fridge does not frost or leak. Its new windows are double-paned and keep the house silent and warm. It is a better shelter than the old house, but she misses the way the children gathered around the stone fireplace on cold evenings with their books and building blocks demanding hot tea and orange blossom cake for casse-croute. She misses the morning light in the bedroom with the large wardrobe and the big four-post bed she and the children would all crowd into for spontaneous sleepovers. She misses the way the stairs go up and up past dusty floors and ancient bricks and rooms that are not yet rooms. But she does not miss him.

Now that she has left him he has stubbornly planted his feet in her home. He hosts parties in her old living room, she can hear them from the window in the new one. If she leans out far enough she can see the light in the windows and the shadow of cigarette smoke. He goes out. He goes for walks, bike rides, barbecues, picnics. He has always had a loud voice and a big presence, and now he makes himself known as often as he can, especially to the men of the village who are eager to befriend her now that she has left him.

Every night he asks one of the children to sleep with him in the old house so that he does not have to sleep alone. 

She wants to tell him no, but every time they fight, he wins. He is the one with the papers and the citizenship, the influential family in the motherland, the expensive lawyers, the silver tongue. Already she has ceded him the house, she has ceded him partial custody, she has ceded him her alimony even though he’d refused to let her work for the entirety of their marriage, she has given him twenty years of meals cooked and beds made, children birthed and clothes washed, of her body and her brain and her tears and her blood.

It is strange, she thinks, for children to fear and pity their father at once. They know his temper and fear it, but mostly they are afraid of his sadness, of the tightness of his embrace and the tears that soak their hair when he thinks they have fallen asleep.

When they come home they repeat the lies he tells them. They say that he will buy them things she knows he will not buy, that he has planned a trip they will never go on, that their family could enjoy it all together if only their mother would come to her senses.

She nods and bites back the truth. She does not admit that she is angry. But she is furious. When she sees her children return from a night at their father’s house, their old house, the one he kicked them out of, their faces are pale and their eyes are dark, and they collapse on their new beds and sleep until the afternoon. Their mornings should be golden with sunrise and gooey yolks and the warm-breath bed-headed joy of youth.

He has always loved old things. It was why they bought that ancient house, even though everything in it was broken and the winter wind slipped in easily through its crumbling walls. On summer Sundays he would browse the vides-greniers in the village and he would bring back an old set of cocktail glasses or a bike with a broken chain or a set of moldy children’s books. She has always hated these old things, cheap old things that remind her that there never was any money for what she wanted, just for his wine, and his cigarettes, and his spontaneous solo trips to faraway places when he would leave her at home alone for weeks bored and wondering how much more it would have cost for him to just take her along.

One vide-grenier Sunday, she gathers all the things that remind her of him, the frumpy clothes he had made her wear, the books he’d bought that their children had never read, the cheap kitchen tools he’d insisted were good enough even after she cut her finger on them a dozen times, and she lays them out on a folding table in the sun. She doesn’t care if the sun bleaches the things to ruin, she wants them gone. Several people pass by, their hands tucked contemplatively behind their backs as they browse politely. One woman, new to town, asks her how much for the books. She tells the woman, whatever you want to pay, and take more, and the woman hands her five euros and walks away with an armful of things.

Just before noon, the window to the living room of her old house opens and her ex’s face emerges. He stares at the table of their old things that she has laid out. When she catches him he glares, icy, and slams the window shut.

That night he tells the children he will take them to a music festival in the woods, that they will go camping together for a week, and he will buy them their favorite sausages to roast over the fire and marshmallows to boot, and listen to people sing and watch people dance, and wouldn’t they like that?

It is the path of least resistance to agree.

So she tells the children they can go. And as the weekend nears the children pack and she makes them sandwiches from the rest of the cheese and salami in the fridge and prepares for a week alone. And after the rush of scurrying feet and a flurry of kisses and I love yous and last waist-high hugs she is alone.

When she is alone she does not know what to do with herself.

She sends messages to her cousin in the next town over. She calls her mother in the home country, the one she cannot return to because he has hidden her papers somewhere in the old house. She dyes her hair. At first she tries to lighten it, but the bleach streaks her hair orange. The next day she dyes it back to its original dark brown black. Her fingertips are dark with dye like wedding henna, and she cannot get the mosquitos off her in this heat that seeps through the thin new walls of this apartment.

She goes to the river at sunset, spindly in late summer, its water green from heat and bloom. The pebbles and stones are still hot underfoot from the noon sun, but when she reaches the water it is cool and refreshing, and she plunges under.

As she passes her old house and sees its windows dark, an unfamiliar ease washes over her. Her old house is empty, big and empty, and he is gone, and in his absence she is reminded that this is her house too. Its thick stone walls have surely kept the inside cool, and she imagines sleeping cold tonight under a blanket, and she thinks of her big four-post bed and the morning light in her old bedroom.

She looks around and the street is empty. She lifts the welcome mat, checks under the flower pots, the ceramic turtles, the windowsill, and stands on her toes to reach up and run her hand over the top of the doorframe — and her fingers hit the spare key.

Her hands remember the quirks of the ancient lock — push in, but not too far, and jiggle it slightly to the right before turning it to the left, and click! The heavy wooden door creaks on its hinges, and she steps onto the burnt red tile of the landing, and the smell of rotting garbage fills her nostrils.

In his fifty-odd years of life, he has always had a woman to clean up after him. At first, his mother, then his first wife, and then her. Now alone, he has made this place uninhabitable. Flies buzz around dishes in the sink, the trash overflows, is strewn about everywhere, his dirty clothes litter every surface, grime cakes the sink, black mold crawls up the white bathroom tile that she laid and grouted to the ceiling that she plastered. The garden is overgrown with weeds and everything she had once planted has shriveled and died.

Her heart breaks for the house that she once wanted this to be, and for the nights her children spend breathing in mildew and mold. She takes pictures of each room. She does not know how they will help her but she feels like at least now she will have proof that she is not a failure for having left him.

She goes to her old bedroom. It is dusty, but untouched, waiting for her return. The wardrobe is still full of clothes, the ones she knew she would never wear again because he had forced her to wear them so many times already.

The sunset filters through the window that she loves, and for a moment she imagines that this house is hers again. She dreams of planting a new garden, of picking ripe tomatoes for lunch’s salad. She dreams of rooms and rooms, finished and sparkling clean, one for each child and two for guests, and one more for her crafts, and one just for the sake of it, maybe a library full of books she will learn to read. She dreams of finally finishing the kitchen, of putting a tub in a second bathroom, of putting her maiden name on the door.

Before she sleeps she takes pictures of every room and she sends them to her cousin. Her cousin tells her to save the pictures for the judge, that they will help her in the final divorce hearing. So she sends the pictures to her lawyer.

In the morning she wakes up on her bed, her clothes covered in dust. And she decides that this house is hers.

She cleans.

She finds a pair of her old rubber gloves under the kitchen sink and takes a big trash bag and fills it with all the empty bottles and wrappers and used napkins and rotting scraps of food, and when one bag is full she fills another, and another, and another. By the time she is done it is night, and the house feels emptier, though it still smells of mold and rot.

The next day, she mixes bleach with water and washes every surface with a sponge she had left behind. She scrubs the mold from the fridge and the sink and the bathroom tile, and she sweeps the floors and dusts all the dusty things, and she gathers up his dirty things and puts them in a big pile on the floor. She shakes the spiders from her gardening gloves and pulls out the dead plants and the weeds until she can see the dirt of the garden again.

When the house starts to resemble itself, she wipes the sweat from her forehead and pours herself a glass of his wine and leans out the living room window and looks at the windows of her apartment across the street.

She walks through the house now that it looks like itself, and she enters his office. He had always forbidden her from entering, she had only entered when he was away. She had looked through his books, flipped through the stack of papers, company papers and tax files and bills that accumulated endlessly on his desk. She had looked through his piles of pens and pencils, half of them broken, she saw that he kept postcards from his first wife. He kept a picture of his mother, God rest her horrible soul, on the bookshelf next to an award with a granite base, and he kept one drawer in his desk locked always.

The drawer is still locked when she tries it. She looks at the award. She picks it up, weighs it in her hands, heavy, and smashes it into the lock again and again and again until little shards of granite and metal have carved cuts into her palm and fingers, and the award becomes slippery with her own blood.

There is a knock at the door, and panic floods in.

She washes her hands and the soapy water burns like acid. When she dries them, blood blooms on the paper towel. There is more knocking, more urgent this time, and hastily she wraps her hands in socks.

When she opens the door she sees the woman from vide-grenier day. The woman looks surprised to see her just as she is surprised to see the woman. The woman glances at the socks on her hand.

Rachid asked me to check on the place, but I couldn’t find the key. She pauses, unsure. I thought you lived across the street.

I do, she replies. She searches for an explanation — I’m helping with some cleaning while he’s away with the kids.

Odd, the woman says. He asked me to … Nevermind, let me call him.

She looks at the woman’s fine blonde hair, her blue eyes and freckled nose, the first hint of jowls tugging at her cheeks. The woman is not pretty, but she is French like his first wife. 

Something ugly and unwanted congeals in her throat. She can feel the moisture of her veins seeping into the socks, and the red bloom finds its way to the outer fibers.

Is that blood? The woman asks. My god, you’re bleeding.

I’m fine, she says, and slams the door shut, and rips the socks off her hands. Her fingers are pink and swollen as she locks the deadbolt.

She calls the locksmith — not the locksmith, not the one in this town, no, she calls one from the next town over, and he says he’ll be over in an hour.

The drawer opens. Inside is a stack of cash, his mother’s wedding ring, a handful of old photos, birth certificates, his French citizenship card, their passports, their children’s passports, her papers. Her papers. She pulls them from the desk and tucks them into her bra. Then she takes them all, sweeps the whole pile into her arms.

Her phone rings. It is him. She ignores his call, but he calls again, again, keeps on calling, until finally she turns off the phone.

Ten minutes later there is another knock at the door. It is a young gendarme whose mother’s house she cleans. He says, your ex-husband has called in to report your presence. You shouldn’t be here. Legally, this isn’t your house.

His voice is light like his blond hair. He is too young, she thinks, to carry himself with the self-assurance that the older gendarmes do.

She says that shared custody is complicated, isn’t it, because she knows his mother is also divorced, and he nods with a sigh, but says she still needs to leave.

She agrees to leave, she will leave once her business is done.

What is your business?

And she invites him inside and shows him around, shows him how she has cleaned every inch of this place. He politely admires her work, though it’s nothing new — he has seen her clean his mother’s place. She glides past the office back to the kitchen and offers him a glass of wine.

He notices the angry red cuts all over her hands and asks what happened.

Broke a glass while cleaning, she explains, and he says that looks serious, you should go to the hospital.

No need, she insists.

Let me bandage it.

His eyes are so earnest that she gives in and digs out a first-aid kid she’d left behind under the sink. He unwraps the gauze skillfully, wraps it gently around her sore fingers and palm. His hands are smooth and soft, and she notices his nails, how clean and pink they are, and his touch sends a small jolt up her spine.

After he has gloved her hands in gauze, he tapes them up and tells her to be more careful next time before he leaves.

Wait, she says, and she shows him the pictures on her phone of the place as she found it.

His eyes flicker darkly.

The children stay here?

She nods.

He contemplates. Then he shakes his head, blinks away the memories behind his eyes. There is nothing he can do, he thinks. He can’t change what the law has decided. So he wishes her well, reminds her to leave, and he departs.

Soon the locksmith comes. She asks him to change the locks as quietly as he can. She slips him a few bills from the cash drawer, double his fee, and he tucks them into his pocket. He drills a hole in the front door and saws through the wood and cuts the lock out, and by the time night has fallen there is a shiny new lock on the door.

That night she sleeps in her pajamas in her bed with freshly washed sheets and locked doors. And in the morning she awakens to the sun streaming through her big window and the sounds of the church bell ringing eight.

She cooks herself a full breakfast in the kitchen, buttery eggs and toasted baguette and fried sausages, and takes a little pat of fresh country cheese for dessert. She sips her coffee by the living room window and watches the tourists walk by below. She passes the midday heat with her belly on the cool tile floor and puts together a puzzle. 

Her divorce lawyer calls her. He tells her the pictures are unusable. She obtained them illegally, and by entering his home she is trespassing, she is jeopardizing her case in court. She retorts, how can she be trespassing when she is in her own home? It is her home, no matter what the law says. He reminds her of all that she has lost already and urges her to leave.

Soon comes a furious knocking at the door. The doorknob jiggles, and she hears her ex scream her name, scream for her to come down and open the door.

She opens the living room window, and she sees him with the three children. In the square behind them, a small crowd of onlookers gathers.

He tells her, in between deep breaths, to open the door and stop acting crazy.

She takes a moth-eaten sweater from the pile of his dirty things and drops it onto the ground below.

He screams and curses, but then he composes himself and tells her to be reasonable, that the children are there, and not to make a fool of herself in front of the town.

Next she drops a ratty sock, then a pair of corduroy pants whose crotch she had sewn back up after he’d ripped them biking, then a tweed jacket he loved because he thought it made him look professorial.

The jacket is his breaking point.

The cork pops and his fury floods into the street. He calls her every name in the book, and a neighbor pulls the children back and covers their ears, and when she crosses her arms and smiles, he lists off every horrible thing he will do to her, her body, her mother, the children, if she does not let him in.

The whole village has gathered. Neighbors lean through open windows, necks craning, cigarettes smoking. Some whisper, and though she can’t hear them, she can read “les Arabes” on their disapproving lips.

The woman from the vide-grenier runs through the square to the raging man. She tugs softly at his shirt, puts a hand on his shoulder and tells him to stop, to calm down, and he pushes her so hard she falls back on the ground and starts crying.

The gendarmes arrive, the young one and the older one, and they coax him away from the front door. When he swings a haymaker at the older one, they wrestle him to the ground and cuff his hands behind his back. 

She catches the eye of the young gendarme. He shakes his head but says nothing as he leads her ex-husband away. 

Tomorrow, the gendarmes will return and ask her to leave. Tomorrow, she will return to the apartment across the street. But tonight, she makes fresh lemonade and an orange blossom cake for casse-croute. The kids finish the puzzle bellies down on the tile floor, and when the youngest has fallen asleep she carries him to the big four-post bed upstairs, and the other two pile on, and they stay up talking until one falls asleep, and then the other, and finally she lets her eyes close and her breath slow, in and out, in and out with the rise and fall of their warm shoulders.

Originally published in the Spring 2025 print issue of The Pinch.

By Irene Jiang

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