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The email arrived on a Tuesday, which was already a cursed day as far as Maya Chen was concerned.
Tuesdays had no redeeming qualities. They lacked Monday’s grim clarity, Wednesday’s promise of midpoint, Thursday’s anticipation, or Friday’s salvation.
They were simply there, grey and purposeless, and it was on this particular grey Tuesday that Maya opened her laptop to find an email from one Stephanie Hartwell-Kowalski — formerly Stephanie Hartwell, soon to be, apparently, Maya’s greatest source of involuntary entertainment.
The subject line read: Invoice #001 — Outstanding Balance Due.
Maya stared at it for a full three seconds before she clicked.
She read it once, quickly, the way you might rip off a bandage.
Then she read it again, slowly, because she needed to be sure she wasn’t hallucinating.
Then she got up, poured herself a glass of wine even though it was eleven in the morning, came back, sat down, and read it a third time.
Invoice #001 — Outstanding Balance Due From: Stephanie Hartwell-Kowalski To: Maya Chen (formerly Kowalski) Re: Expenses to Fix What You Left Behind
The itemized list that followed was, without question, the single most extraordinary document Maya had encountered in her thirty-eight years on earth, and she had once received a certified letter from a neighbor claiming her wind chimes were “spiritually aggressive.”
Optical Care & Vision Correction — $300.00 Daniel required comprehensive eye examination and corrective lenses. His untreated vision impairment, unaddressed during your nine-year marriage, suggests chronic neglect of his basic health needs.
Maya had laughed so hard at that one that she’d spilled her wine.
Daniel Kowalski had always refused to go to the eye doctor. He’d refused for the same reason he refused to see any doctor — a deep, irrational conviction that the medical establishment was a conspiracy designed to tell him things he didn’t want to hear. Maya had begged, cajoled, bribed, and eventually issued what she now recognized as her finest ultimatum: “Daniel, I will hide every television remote in this house until you get your eyes checked.” He’d worn his glasses for two weeks and then lost them in the couch cushions, which was where they presumably remained to this day, or had until Stephanie came along and presumably dug them out while calculating what Maya owed her.
Wardrobe Rehabilitation — $2,500.00 Daniel’s clothing situation upon our marriage was, frankly, alarming. Multiple items dated to 2009. Complete wardrobe overhaul required to bring him to a presentable standard befitting a man of his position and my expectations.
Daniel had loved those clothes. He’d had a gray henley he’d owned since college that he wore approximately four times a week, and he’d looked, Maya had always thought, genuinely comfortable and even slightly handsome in it. She had occasionally suggested that perhaps the henley could be retired, and he had looked at her the way people look at someone suggesting they put down a beloved family pet.
She hoped, briefly, that Stephanie had thrown out the henley. She hoped Daniel had mourned it properly.
Orthopedic Sleep Surface Replacement — $1,000.00 The mattress Daniel brought from the marital home caused significant back discomfort. A quality sleep surface is foundational to physical wellness. New mattress purchased for his health and our comfort.
That mattress had been perfectly good. Maya had bought it in 2018, after extensive research, from a reputable company. If Daniel had back pain, it was because Daniel had the posture of a man who’d been folded into a storage unit, which she had also, at length, tried to address.
She continued reading.
Nutritional Recalibration & Cooking Classes — $450.00 Daniel’s relationship with food required significant intervention. A series of cooking classes have been undertaken to provide him with nutritional meals aligned with proper macros and wellness goals.
Emotional Support & Couples Therapy — $600.00 Extensive therapeutic investment required to help Daniel process and overcome previous relationship trauma. Ongoing.
Home Environment Optimization — $400.00 General home improvements required to create a living space conducive to Daniel’s mental health and productivity.
And then, at the bottom, a grand total of $5,250.00, and a note:
Payment due within 30 days. As Daniel’s wife, I have invested heavily in fixing him. His needs were evidently unmet for many years, and the cost of addressing this falls, morally if not legally, to you. I hope you will do the right thing. I accept Venmo, Zelle, or personal check. — Stephanie
Maya sat with the invoice for a long time.
She thought about calling her sister, Rachel, who would shriek with laughter and then suggest Maya simply ignore it, which was the rational advice and therefore completely useless.
She thought about calling her lawyer, Ben, who would tell her this had no legal standing whatsoever, which she already knew, and bill her three hundred dollars for the confirmation.
She thought about calling Daniel himself, but she and Daniel had reached a détente in their post-divorce life that involved approximately four communications per year, mostly about the cat (Biscuit had been a joint-custody situation that had resolved itself when Biscuit decisively chose Maya and began staging what could only be described as a hunger strike whenever Daniel appeared).
Instead, Maya opened a new document.
She made herself another cup of coffee, this time, because it was now noon and she had some professional standards.
She cracked her knuckles.
And she began to write.
It had started, as so many chapters of the Stephanie saga had, with a phone call Maya had never anticipated and still wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t dreamed.
Three months before the wedding — the second wedding, Stephanie and Daniel’s wedding, not Maya and Daniel’s wedding, which had been a modest and genuinely lovely affair at a botanical garden that Maya still looked back on with complicated fondness — Maya’s phone had rung with an unknown number.
She’d answered it because she’d been expecting a call from her dentist.
“Is this Maya? Daniel’s ex-wife?”
She’d confirmed this, cautiously.
“This is Stephanie. His fiancée.” A pause. “I hope this isn’t weird.”
It was already extremely weird.
What followed was a forty-minute conversation that Maya had subsequently described to Rachel as “the most surreal experience of my adult life, including the time I accidentally attended a timeshare presentation for forty-five minutes before I realized what was happening.”
Stephanie, it transpired, was preparing her wedding vows and wanted them to be “really specific and meaningful, not just generic.” She had a vision: she wanted to highlight, for Daniel and their assembled guests, exactly what she was bringing to the relationship that had been previously absent. A kind of catalogue of her value-add.
